Speaker 1:
I played all sorts of sports when I was a kid, so I loved to bike, hike, run, play basketball, play football. My biggest hobby though, honestly, is being a father to my two sons. I've got a 11 year old and a nine year old sons, Alejandro and Santiago, and it all came crashing down and I had later what I figured out was a panic attack, and I've broken bones on a football field and torn ligaments on a basketball court, but none of that prepared me for that moment.
I did get to the bottom. I felt for a while like maybe my life didn't matter, and I can remember lying on my bed alone and thinking to myself, "If I passed away right now on my bed, how long would it take before somebody knew?" That's a disturbing thought to have. Very disturbing. Because I think all men want to know that they matter.
Well, I think what men fall into is the trap. We have the tendency to do what I call the wounded dog syndrome, right? Think of Old Yeller. When the dog gets wounded, what does he do? He slinks off in the woods, he lies down under a tree, and one of two things happens. He either gets well and comes back to the pleasure of his master, or he doesn't, and he just dies. And there's a lot of men that literally or figuratively, they're dying inside.
Probably a little bit of ego, right? The drive that I have for my father to always do the best, be the best, move forward, and my sons, my sons at the time were about three and one, and I had an obligation. I had a responsibility, no matter what was happening with me, no matter how traumatic, how severe, I had an obligation to my roles and my responsibilities.
And initially, men, we don't like to open up, but over time you really start to realize that the more you share, the more that you can really start to heal from it. What I'm a firm believer is that we need each other. That's how we're built. We're built for community. They talk about failure to thrive in infants, if they're not touched, if they're not held. I grew up in groups my whole life, from the time I was six to the college, and then the rest of our adult lives were supposed to be these fiercely independent lone wolves proving to ourselves and the rest of the world how we can do it alone. The treatment part I really think is in the community piece. Now, if you need that in terms of professional help, then you want to go find professional help.
I went through group counseling, I went through personal counseling. I read a ton of books. I took my sons and I had a family counseling. I did everything after I finally broke down. But before that, I took the machismo route, which was, "I don't need anything and I don't need anybody, and I'll do this all on my own because I am not broken. I don't need to be fixed." And you have to get past that. I call it the hole, that hole in your soul. Instead of thinking about the 98 things that aren't right, well actually it's the reverse of that. Too many times we don't think of the 98 things that are going right, we just think of the one or two things that are going wrong.