Reconstruction: Jason's Inspiring Journey Back from Mental Health Abyss

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Emotional Men Weekly podcast. Today, as promised, Jason is back and we were talking about the second stage of mental health. So this is the reconstruction stage.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Yep, yes, it is yeah.

Speaker 1: 0:28

You've hit rock bottom, you've crashed and burned. Are you struggling getting out of bed? We're going to hear from Jason what exactly was his crash like Something that we can all relate, probably relate to and then, just how did he pick up the pieces? So, jason, turn the forward to you right off the bat. Talk to us about what was it like for the crash, would it lead up to it, what did it look like and how did you snap out?

Speaker 2: 0:58

Yeah, again, thank you for having me. And what led up to it was, I think in the previous episode we had talked about I had mentioned kind of these pillars that had been recognized in my life Early on, as I, you know, go through this rebuilding, the crash and rebuild of myself in therapy. I mentioned that you rebuild. I have these pillars that kind of make me who I am and my foundation, if you will, which is a physical, a spiritual, a mental and work, emotional, social aspect. And so we spoke on our last episode how each one of those pillars began to have cracks in it because of unbalanced issues in my life and I wasn't attending to each pillar and trying to fill those cracks and keep my foundation solid on that downward slope. And, as we mentioned before, we had two brand new twins.

Speaker 2: 1:53

My work had been going through some changes at work. I would just hit paternity leave when those changes happened at work, and so when you're on paternity leave, you're not able legally to talk to people at work. It's like this separation hey, you're legally on leave, boom, you can't have those conversations and so work all of a sudden not sleeping because newborn twins. I'm getting up every single night with my wife I never done this before Me and her at the same time. Right, each one has a baby. You have timers, we're up every two hours, it's this and then so it's multiple times a night. We're not sleeping. And the physical aspect I didn't want to get up and go work out, I didn't want to go for a bike ride, I physically just was not able to do anything. I was so tired. And so that pillar began to have cracks and become and shift my foundation spiritual. I've grown up Christian and believer in God, our Father and Jesus Christ. And during this time I was exhausted. I didn't really pray much, I wasn't going to our Sunday meetings, I wasn't reading the Word of God or scripture, I wasn't feeding that pillar, I wasn't taking care of that pillar. So that began to crack and my foundation starts to do this. And then I start to mentally just be waiver a little bit. I start to mentally I can't talk to anybody at work about what the changes have just happened that had that effect me directly. I'm not sleeping, I'm not doing all these things, I'm not doing all these things. So mentally I just start to just spiral in this effect. And so what led to that?

Speaker 2: 3:34

One night I had just come back, I had been on paternity leave for two months and I come back and come off a paternity leave a couple of weeks at work and these changes had happened and got a new manager. I had lost my senior partner and I was expected to just do so much, but I was still in the state of unbalanced. Those other pillars were crumbling, if you will, and I had a meeting with my manager one afternoon. He just said hey, this is going terrible, what are you doing? And so, mentally for me, I was just like Whoa. All of a sudden that mental pillar just broke and so I came home.

Speaker 2: 4:10

I sat on my floor that night and I'll never forget. I just broke down. All those pillars had just crumbled and everything that had been me had just finally broke and it had gotten to that point where I sat on that floor and it was the darkest place I had ever been. It was I have to quit my job, I have to give up our lifestyle, I have to all these unrational, very irrational, and I started to vocalize them and my wife is sitting next to me like what is happening and I'll never forget just that weight of everything. I had this tunnel vision of what my life had become, what it was, because of all those things that just had compacted and then broken me down.

Speaker 2: 5:04

And I sat there that night and I sat out loud to my wife. I said I just I feel like I'm going to die. And it was that heavy. And it was one of these things where I'll never forget and I don't ever want any person to ever feel that ever. And there was no hope, it was just nothing mattered.

Speaker 2: 5:27

I was dark, I was alone and for the next couple of weeks or two I didn't get out of bed. And I remember one of my kids came in one morning and been a couple of mornings and she said to my wife she said, hey, why isn't that I'm getting out of bed? And it was one of these things where, okay, I need some help. I never needed help before, but it was a different kind of help now. It was my wife would just try and get me to do something right, to be back who I was Jason, just get up, go to the gym, just get up, go for a walk. Just get up out of bed, brush your teeth, put some clothes on. It was this step by step process that I just my mental capacity wasn't there anymore, and so that was that whole breakdown.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Well, I would snap you out of it. How do you bounce back from that place of darkness For those who are in it, who may be listening or those who are wondering how do they get out of that dark place? How do you get the energy to get out of bed?

Speaker 2: 6:47

Yeah, and if anyone who listens to this is listening, I say to you I see you and I feel you. I've been there before. It is a place you can get out of. There is absolute hope, because I'm sitting here talking right now to you.

Speaker 2: 7:09

What we did was, after about the two week mark, it was okay, we need some serious help in terms of therapy. I needed to just talk to somebody about what was going on in here, what was blocking everything out, and so I went to. I had two different types of therapy in terms of one therapist and then another. The first therapist that I went to I've mentioned before. He started me on one medication for anxiety, and so I got on medication as well, some prescription medication, and it's interesting, I want people to know that therapy and medication has a weird connotation around it. I feel like society still has this. I think we're doing better, but I want people to know that the true synonym of therapy, I learned, is a healing treatment. That's what a synonym for therapy means. And I started going to therapy and I learned about those four quadrants of my life, or four pillars physical, spiritual, mental and work, social, emotional. Those four that had all broken down. And so, through therapy and talking, that's the biggest thing. One of the biggest things I want us guys and men to know is that I know we're not good at it, I know that I wasn't before and still, if you ask my wife, she's. I don't think you are still that great at telling how you feel and emotion and things like that, but just there's power in releasing how you feel, there's power in speaking, there's power in talking to somebody and for me, talking in therapy was nice because it didn't have any backstory to what I was saying and like we got to know each other. But it wasn't on a personal level. That kind of maybe came with some baggage, if you will, or came with if you opened up to a family member, but if that's who you open up to, by all means, please that. I'm just speaking more towards therapy in general.

Speaker 2: 9:17

Got on another medication for depression. So I was diagnosed with severe anxiety, severe depression. Through multiple sessions of therapy and what that did with the medications. It almost was like a helper in blunting everything that I was feeling negative. It was helping me just sort through and rebuild each pillar and not have everything come at me all at once, creating that almost that anxiety and depression to a level of not getting out of bed, paralyzing limit, if you will. And so I think the medications I know the medications helped me filter and slowly ease back into feeling all these emotions and feeling all these things from work, from all the family things, from all the pressures that I felt, from all the just day to day priorities and things that I needed to do to provide for a family to be there, for a family to become me again, and so that's also what I want others to know about that you rebuild yourself, I think, for anyone listening now, you try and rebuild yourself, find your anchors, find your pillars.

Speaker 2: 10:32

Dwayne the Rock Johnson I'm a big fan of his and he talks about his anchors and he'll speak about it right there as he's post-workout hey, I had a terrible day yesterday, but I woke up because I knew that this anchor today, waking out, getting his grind in that morning, would try and give him the best hope of success for that day. And so what I did? I was at a point where I'll pull him back, my spiritual side. I talked to my dad and my dad said, hey, we finally pulled in my parents and her and my wife's parents because we just needed some a little bit extra help. I put a lot of pressure and a lot of ownership on my wife during this time and to run the family basically. And so, going back to talking with my dad, he said, after all these things and multiple conversations, hey, just try something for me. Just read a passage of scripture every day, just try it. He said I don't know how, why, but something about it has helped me throughout my mid 60s, mid late 60s in his life. He just says there's some power to it. So I tried to realign that and build that pillar back up step by step, trying to center myself back to God, and that was a big thing for me. To be honest with you, that was something that really pulled me back into kind of a center state, and so these were some of the things that I it's this day by day.

Speaker 2: 12:07

Another thing I'll say to anyone listening is it's, it doesn't. It took me a full year to be better again. Give yourself grace and time, but know that it's. It's a step by step process. Take it literally day by day. Have your day by, your daily things that you can do your anchors right. You wake up, you tell yourself it's going to be a good day. Or hey, today may suck, but I'm going to make the most of it. Or, and then you can get up, go for a walk, or that night go for your walk, or have things that help you rebuild your foundations, those pillars in your life each day.

Speaker 1: 12:51

What prevents you from going to therapy in the first place?

Speaker 2: 12:54

Yeah, good question. I didn't know I needed it. I was unaware, I had never experienced their therapy before. It was one of these things that in my life I had never really explored, not even just not explored, but just talked about with people and talked about, hey, it's therapy is something so much more than just someone sitting back there at the pad and just jotting out notes that you're stressed about. What are they writing about? It's something I just said what's this cat and mouse game that we're doing? It was so different than that, at least in my experience, but, yeah, I had never really known what it was or taking any type of step or action to explore it, which was another thing I hope men can explore more.

Speaker 1: 13:44

What do you think are some of the stigmas that men currently hold that are detrimental To getting?

Speaker 2: 13:50

help. If you're emotional, you're not manly. That's still a big stigma for us, and you can wrap that into talking about your feelings. You can wrap that into seeing your wife seeing you cry or one of your kids seeing you cry. You can wrap that into there's so much that we think about past generations. Right, they were the things they had to do in history. It was so different that they didn't explore that, and so it trickled down from generation to generation.

Speaker 1: 14:23

I may even challenge that. There's two things here that I think being the name of the podcast is the emotional man. I think what's so often you can even see what you just said is that when we think of emotions, if we think of someone as emotional, we automatically picture this weeping person who's just like irrational and feminine and just like totally losing it.

Speaker 2: 14:55

Yes, we do.

Speaker 1: 14:57

Whereas if I ask someone, that man over there, who's being brave, courageous, resolute, determined, ambitious, is he emotional. I just listed seven emotions.

Speaker 2: 15:11

I love that.

Speaker 1: 15:12

The fact that we need to recalibrate what the emotional man is, the whole picture.

Speaker 2: 15:20

Yes.

Speaker 1: 15:21

It's not just sad, it's not just despondent or worried or anxious, it's the whole package. It's the determined, it's the bravery, the courage, the vulnerability, the being resolute. You think of all the manly characteristics someone who's stoic, someone who's resilient? Oh yeah, those are all emotions.

Speaker 2: 15:45

I love that.

Speaker 1: 15:47

I just want to, and I think one of the stigmas I try to break on this show is helping people realize that if you ever felt frustrated, angry, upset, those are all emotions. Have you ever felt that peace? Have you ever felt content?

Speaker 2: 16:02

satisfied, proud, yeah, literally all these things that we do every day, every hour, we have yeah, we have emotions every hour. That's phenomenal. I love that. That's definitely a stigma we need to break and I couldn't. You said it perfectly. That's something that I hope you and I and everybody in this space continue to bring forward. That's amazing.

Speaker 1: 16:27

And so what I love about Jason here is that A, it's okay to feel negative emotion because it's part of life, it's part of the spectrum of life. And if you can't, if emotions were color like not willing or suppressing emotions, you're suppressing and muting your capacity to experience life, and that is how you become a psychopath. If you can't, if you can't feel emotions, you will have a very difficult time making choices. Yeah, if this is shown in psychology and Jason, thank you so much for opening up, letting us see inside that it's this dark time and the truth is, to one degree or another, there's a spectrum here. We've all had those dark moments and nothing's we're not broken. Or even if we are unbalanced, or even if we are broken, that doesn't mean we don't have worse. We are all worse loved. I love the fact that you one of your affirmations is you are loved, even if that person who's loving you is.

Speaker 2: 17:34

And that's that's, I think, some of the one of the hardest things, even if that is person, that person is you. I think we are our own worst critics. I say that all the time and I think we need to do, especially as men and this is something I'm working on is continue to tell yourself you're doing a good job. You are doing a good job, even if you feel like, again, you have those kind of blinders on. Take them off. Try and take them off for a second and look at all the accomplishments you've had in your life. Look at how, start to name things that in your life that you don't have quote unquote, but have that have are able to bring you that centering, that peace and for you, for your own mental state and who you are, that you are loved Absolutely. If, even if you feel like nobody does, I promise you God does. That's the one thing I will say for sure. I promise you.

Speaker 1: 18:34

Amen, amen. Thank you, jason, thanks and everyone. This has been Jason Davies. We're excited for the upcoming third and final episode. We're talking about. This is the reconstruction, but how do we aim for real growth? We've learned from the past. We've hit rock bottom, we've built ourselves back up, and how do we start aiming for real growth? And that's what something will be explored next time. So thanks everyone for joining us.