My wife was the person who finally pushed me toward something I had been resisting: psychotherapy.
At the time, therapy was almost a taboo word for me.
It wasn’t just my personal attitude. It was part of the environment I had grown up in. In my head, psychotherapy was for people with serious psychological problems.
Not for someone like me.
I thought I should be able to fix this myself.
I thought therapy would probably be a waste of time and money.
And underneath all of that was another uncomfortable question: What would people think if they knew I was seeing a psychiatrist?
Looking back, that fear of being judged was probably one of the biggest reasons I resisted going at all.
Eventually I found a psychiatrist through a recommendation from someone I knew.
Then came the first session.
He sat across from me and said nothing.
Thirty seconds, maybe.
It felt much longer.
I remember wondering what exactly I was supposed to do while this man simply looked at me.
Then he asked one question.
Why are you here?
And I started talking.
For about ten minutes, almost without stopping.
Then came more questions. And slowly I began talking about things I had never really spoken about before.
Some of them might have sounded small to another person. But they were connected to emotions I had carried for a long time without really examining them.
It reminded me of the ‘emotional pipe’ metaphor I described earlier. I had been very good at packing things away.
After that first session, I felt lighter.
Not fixed.
Lighter.
At first I went once a week. Then every two weeks. Then once a month.
After roughly six months, my psychiatrist felt I was ready to continue more independently. I felt that too.
The anxious thoughts and physical reactions had not vanished, but for me they had become less frequent, less intense and easier to manage.
Therapy also opened something I hadn’t expected: self-analysis.
Listening to myself talk made me look back at my own history differently.
The war. Moving. Changing schools. Being extremely shy. Trying to fit into new environments. Years later, the pressure I put on myself at work.
I began to see a recurring theme in the way I interpreted many of those experiences: confidence.
That is my interpretation of my own story, not a diagnosis or a universal explanation for anxiety.
For me, confidence wasn’t one permanent thing I either had or didn’t have. I could feel very capable in one part of life and surprisingly fragile in another.
The more I understood that, the more I started separating two questions.
Can I do this?
And: Am I still okay if I struggle with this?
That distinction mattered.
I also began thinking differently about the way we compare ourselves with other people and how easily we can start believing we are behind, not good enough or somehow failing at life.
Again, these were reflections that came out of my own therapy and self-analysis. They were not a formula for everyone else.
Therapy didn’t solve everything overnight.
What it gave me was a way to look at myself with more awareness and less automatic fear.
And that awareness gave me something I had been missing.
A little more balance.
The next question was what to do with it.
Because understanding myself better was important — but understanding alone was not going to change my everyday life.
Discussion prompt: If you ever resisted asking for professional help, what was the hardest part — the idea of therapy itself, the fear of being judged, or something else?