How telling my story has helped make connections

I went public about my therapy after COVID.

In reality, I’d been in therapy on and off since 2013.

I initially decided (or submitted) to therapy about a year after covering the Sandy Hook school shooting as a young newspaper reporter. While I was based in York, PA, the newspaper I worked for had a sister paper, the New Haven Register, and the small newspaper staff couldn’t manage the aftermath the national news cycle demanded.

I was used to covering crime and breaking news, but journalism really lacked the resources and knowledge for how to support reporters coming back from traumatic scenarios.

When I returned, there was an envelope on my desk with a phone number for Crisis Intervention if I needed to speak to someone.

It would take me at least six months to finally admit I needed therapy.

I thought I was just burnt out, but aside from covering really traumatic things not only in my community but in other parts of the country, I had no skills for how to process hard things.

This is why, even when I left that job and thought my life was better, new stressors and old trauma would send me back to therapy a few more times.

All the while, my life progressed.?

I relaunched my career as an entrepreneur, starting a marketing company with my husband.?

We had our son. We bought a home. We had our daughter.

We adopted one dog, a decade later we got a second dog.

I got involved in my community. I served on boards. I spoke at luncheons and emceed events.

And all the while I spoke to a professional about my childhood sexual abuse, my relationship with my family, my need for anxiety medication, and the overwhelming sense of doom I felt after COVID.

For years, there was a real fear for me that someone would find out most of my secrets. That childhood sexual abuse, for one, I couldn’t even tell my husband about until after my first son was born. The fear of something similar happening to him was paralyzing.

I never wanted people to think I was dirty. Or gross. Or broken.

I couldn’t tell people I loved about this abuse or my need to process it, much less people in my community who I wanted to see me as a leader. I wanted to be someone they could trust and regard as a professional.

How could they know I was in therapy?

It turns out that one of (if not the main) goals, I had in seeing a therapist about that sexual abuse was that it would no longer be a secret. If I wanted to tell someone, I could. And it would bring no shame to my family. It would not cause me further harm.

And so, I practiced by telling my sisters. Then my friends.

And no pain came to me.

If anything, I was embraced and loved. And some of them shared their own secrets. Not abuse of the same kind, necessarily, but something they were holding onto that they thought would cause people to judge them.

And they found no judgment – but love.

Clearly, from the column alone, I am now open about not only being in therapy but a load of other things that make me human. I used to think they made me imperfect, but I know now they just make me real.

And while the title of this post was about how being real is good for business, the reality is, I can’t say it brought me sales (that seems weird, actually), but it brought me peace.

That is good for business.

I took away the power of someone else saying, oh, she’s flawed. Instead, I said: I’m real. This is who I am. You can take it or leave it.

And oh, how people have embraced me. Shared their own stories of anxiety and medication to help it. Of adult children who have been depressed and they don’t know what to do.

All of that sharing is good for community. It’s good for us. And my friends, it’s the only way I know how to be.