I highly recommend therapy. Generally, men in the US find it difficult to seek out help. Often they think it's a failing and avoid it, especially in the context of relationships. Therapy is something you could almost do for yourself, if you could work out the puzzle. Therapy can do wonders at breaking the initial problem and giving you some things you can work on.

Therapists can also provide useful inputs for career and work optimization. They get treated as mental health problem solvers, but you may get more optimization out of therapy than attending a conference or doing something that's traditional for career development.

Finding the right therapist takes some effort. Don't expect it to help initially. Do some education on the kinds of things they treat and mental health in general. I suffer from anxiety, but I never made that connection before.

I would also add to give it time and not give up after one or two sessions. It takes time to establish a relationship with a therapist you connect with and to see patterns in your life emerge.

At one point (maybe 15~20 years ago?), I had two sessions/week with a therapist for about a year. 3 therapists in a row.

I must be crap at finding therapists. The ones I found were really against being "interventionists" and didn't want to share with me what they were seeing from our very lightly guided conversation (where I didn't even know what I should be talking about).

"A little intervention and a little guidance would be cool folks! Otherwise, why am I not talking to a tape recorder?"

Please don't interpret this comment as against therapy in any way because therapy is an important and useful tool.

But the tape recorder kind of conversations (and you can just do these yourself) is actually a really effective tool when you are feeling overwhelmed. I use a journal instead of a tape recorder but it lets me establish how I am feeling at that moment, and then I can revisit later and evaluate what was going on.

If you're able to do this consistently, it becomes a really valuable tool because you can start to find correlations. "I notice I get depressed when I spend too much time just playing games". Correlations aren't necessarily causation, but even just that simple correlative analysis can be a meaningful tool.

Thanks for that.

Also I need to find a way to find better therapists! :-)

EDIT: Or maybe just realize that I get more depressed (and anxious) when I drink massive amounts of depressants, and, you know, stop? :-)

For me, and this is entirely anecdotal, I was typically overindulging in alcohol when I was upset about something and wanted to get my mind off of it. Which is great in theory except of course you end up stewing instead, but stopping the drinking didn't actually fix the root problem either, just a particular expression of it.

Ultimately I ended up adjusting my environment by both accepting it was OK to end some relationships with some angry people in my life (not angry at me, but angry generally) and adjusting how I approach work.

Fair enough. That makes sense. And Thank you for that.

In my case, I had a couple of back-to-back life-events that I just couldn't process/accept, (and frankly using alcohol to deal with the first probably lead to the second), but, then, hey! I was an addict! It probably took me 15~20 years to stop using that as my go-to avoidance technique (even though I knew how unhealthy/unuseful it was, I didn't really have another. Shame on me)

Finding a good therapist is both hard, and a very trial & error process.

The founders of NLP used to joke that there are many paths to mental health, but none so lucrative as Freudian psychotherapy.

I tend to try to seek out CBT people, but I found that a lot of them started out as classicists themselves, and then we find our way back into being "non-interventionists".

My mental model now is that the cycle of life goes something like this: Born -> WTF is Going on Here? -> Death

Maybe that's cynical, but it helps me believe that I'm not the only one who is fucked up between the ears .

Hmmm curiously, just read a book about how Freud brought about modernity and was conscious of how people would keep looking for some life guidance even though he had basically got rid of Tradition/Culture.

That said, keep looking, it has been terribly helpful for me to have someone who can analytically call on any bullshit I tell myself. I've learned to catch a lot of my patterns myself, but this guy simply catches the ones I miss or helps me understand why something is troubling me. I'd say our conversations are pretty balanced in who is speaking.

Practically speaking, what would a therapiat tell me that I can't find or learn on my own?

If you’re extremely self reflective; nothing.

For most of us, a therapist can tell you a lot of things that you could observe about yourself but won’t admit to. Most people have a blind spot the size of themselves.

Some things can be so intensively painful that we can't even acknowledge they exist within us, let alone begin to unpack and talk about them.

Speaking from my own experience it took me two years of therapy to get to acknowledge something very traumatic. Then the work could finally begin to start working on it.

It's easy to underestimate just how deep the "humans are social creatures" thing goes. Your mind has capabilities that more or less only work in the context of an interaction. Communication orders your thoughts in a way that rumination doesn't. Cues from others calibrate your level of certainty.

The better question is why do you need a such an expensive, highly trained listener? It seems to me that some people (particularly women) get what amounts to therapy from very close and secure friendships. Universities also sometimes have programs to facilitate a similar kind of communication with lightly trained volunteers from your peer group. You may still get a decent proportion of the benefit from something like this. But it stands to reason that a pro is better at it.

Nothing.

You can learn ballroom dancing alone in a room too, it's just much easier with a partner.