The Backstage Actor: Why Hire a Human Therapist?

I lost a parent shortly before starting high school. So when teachers said things like “You’re so smart, just imagine what you could accomplish if you really tried!”, everyone was content to call it grief.

And I was absolutely grieving.

When my grades dropped suddenly halfway through my undergrad, I called it burnout.

And I stand by it. I was burnt out.

When the learning curve wore off about two years into my passion-fuelled non-profit job, I was diagnosed with an idiopathic sleeping disorder.

And as inconclusive as that felt, it got me what I needed.

When I struggled to keep up with my work-from-home job as a first-time postnatal mom, I figured that was just the nature of the transition into parenthood, remote work, and lack of childcare access.

And let's face it, those are heavy burdens no matter who you are.

None of these labels were wrong, and they gave me access to the support I needed in each life stage. The names I gave my challenges were helpful frameworks while I was living through them, and my response to each one shaped skills and strengths that I still draw on today.

But when my kids needed assessment and started coming home with neurodiversity diagnoses, some of the missing pieces started to fall into place.

The cycles of passion and burnout. The particular way that grief moved through me. The themes behind the pain points when life became overwhelming. The ways my body responded when I was always “on”.

There was another actor pulling on the ropes backstage.

The diagnosis wasn’t really the point for me. On a practical level, having a potential label was exciting because I felt like I had a better filter for what strategies and skills might be most worth trying when I was problem solving. It was like a short cut to the best options, because there was a search term that I could type into Google. But on an emotional level, it was just a relief to feel like maybe I understood myself a little better now, and maybe other people would see me more clearly through this lens too.

I didn’t have to feel quite so alone.

There’s no replacement for time in the process of untangling all the pieces that make up our experiences. But as we’re in the middle of the uncertainty, we move through a place that can be dangerous if we’re not feeling well connected and supported by other human beings.

The mental blocks, the physical exhaustion, the emotional lows, the difficulty with focus and taking action, all of these things can be signs, but signs of what exactly? Sometimes it’s wise to step into the room with someone who’s been trained to see and understand what the signs could be pointing toward.

In Nova Scotia where I live and practice, Registered Counselling Therapists are not trained or licensed to provide a diagnosis. But we are trained to identify symptoms, and we are trained to respond to those symptoms in ways that science (and before they were tested scientifically, often collective cultural wisdom) have shown us will help people make it through the other side of uncertainty safely.

Thanks to all this training, if there are any other actors pulling on the ropes backstage of your experiences, chances are good that we’ve met them before.

And we'd love to head backstage with you and meet them again.