Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Revisit: Trauma, Depression & Self-Discovery, with Wil Wheaton

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

We're revisiting another episode from the MBB vault! Wil Wheaton helps us break down the importance of setting boundaries, getting to the root of emotional pain instead of self-medicating, and the beauty of becoming the parent you never had.  He opens up about his tumultuous relationship with his parents, his lifelong battle with depression, anxiety, & addiction, and his breakdown at the airport that led him to seek help. We also hear how sobriety and therapy became his “escape hatch” and his explanation for why “naming the thing” can cause it to lose its power over you. Enjoy the best moments of Wil Wheaton, and tune in on Tuesday for a brand new full episode of MAYIM BIALIK’S BREAKDOWN. Check out our full episode with Wil Wheaton: https://mayim.simplecast.com/episodes/wil-wheaton-on-trauma-depression-self-discovery BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the reasons I am so open about this and I speak so unashamedly about it, I suffered my. I suffered for like 15 years longer than I needed to because I was so ashamed. He started me on a medication. I would say it was probably six or seven days later. Anne and I were on a walk in the neighborhood. And for the very first time in my life, I could hear the birds singing. There it is. This is a thing.

I was aware of the beautiful flowers in our neighbor's yards. I could feel the crispness of the air. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. I could feel all these things that I had never felt before. And I turned to Anne and realized, and I said to her, I have just been existing This is gone The comparison I used

It was like I had been inside this This room where there were no lights And like Swedish death metal Like cranked up to 11 I had found the door Out of the room The like adjusting the medical Adjusting the chemical balance of my brain

I just started to cry I felt so relieved I felt so good I felt so free and getting the chemicals in my brain worked out made it possible for me to start working with an individual therapist who could help me through my PTSD. It's Miami-Bi Alex breakdown.

She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. My and Bialx Breakdown is supported by Katz Prize. When it comes to choosing cat litter, our go-to is lightweight litter by Catspride. Makes me feel like I'm working smarter, not harder, when I'm caring for my count-um three kitties. That's because Catspride lightweight litter is up to 40% lighter than traditional scoopable litter brands. That's amazing to me that they can make it so much lighter. It also offers 10 days of powerful odor control, also amazing.

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Hi, I am Iambiolic, and welcome to our Thursday bite-sized edition of The Breakdown. This week, we are revisiting an early, an oldie but a goody, an early episode of the podcast. It remains one of our most popular episodes to this day. It is with Will Whiten.

And when I first started this podcast, Will was literally one of the first people on my list. I just knew I had to have him on because he's actually one of the main influences in my life who inspired me to be more vocal about my struggles with mental health. And he's been an inspiration to me. He was incredibly open. It's a fantastic episode. He talks about his incredibly tumultuous relationship with his parents,

his lifelong battle with depression, with anxiety, and aspects of addiction, what it physically feels like in your body, and he had a breakdown at an airport that led him to seek help. He talks all about it. He also talks about setting boundaries, holding boundaries, getting to the root of emotional pain instead of self-medicating, and a beautiful phrase, becoming the parent that you never had as like a model for his life. He also talks about sobriety and therapy as his escape. patch, and he talks about why naming the thing, like whatever the thing is naming the thing,

can help it lose power over you. And that's been, again, a real inspiration for me. This episode is a very important reminder that while it takes continued hard work to overcome our mental health struggles, we should never hesitate to ask for help when we need it. And there are so many resources out there that can help us heal and manage all of the struggles that we have. Please enjoy the best moments of Will Wheaton and tune in on Tuesday for a brand new full episode of Myambiolics Breakdown. Break it down. In my family, mental health was not discussed at all.

And if you had any mental health struggles, it was weakness. It was shameful. It was embarrassing. And particularly by my mother, really downplay. as something that like, just cheer up, you know, or like, oh, you just worry so much. And honestly, I think it really exacerbated my depression. Being sort of gaslighted by my mother and really emotionally abused by my father, like those things together, I think it helped develop this chemical imbalance in my brain.

I have no contact with my parents. They're not great people. My father is an abusive bully. My mother enabled him, protected him, and really used me to fulfill her need to be famous. My mom just lies about everything. Like everything is like the way she wanted it to be rather than the way it actually was, which I think exacerbated my depression. Right.

Because it made me feel totally, totally crazy. My mother made me become a working actor. I was over it real fast. I hated it. I hated being in traffic. I hated learning lines. I hated going in and trying to get other people to like me. I couldn't even get my dad to like me.

Like I had to go and get other people. I get strangers to like me. I hated it. And I begged to let me stop. Over and over and over again. I don't want to do this. Please don't make me do this. Can I please stop doing this?

I remember so clearly saying, I just want to be a kid. My Ambialx breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine, drink more water. There's no real data. There's no game plan. This has happened to me many, many times,

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Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention my ambiotic breakdown to help support the show. When I was a teenager, I felt really sad a lot of the time. I felt lonely. I felt like an outsider. And I lived with a really intense imposter syndrome because of my father's abuse.

He was so emotionally abusive to me. Like he adores my brother and is wonderful with my sister and just clearly made a choice. Just made an effort. Like one day was just like, I just don't like this kid. or I'm just going to bully this kid.

And that was just, that's just who he is. And so much of my mental health struggles, I think, was born in the crucible of that abuse. And I don't recall a day where I was like, I think I have depression. Like, I don't recall that at all. But I always felt, I always felt what was just described as like, sad. I have a complex post-traumatic stress disorder from my father's abuse. I have a generalized anxiety disorder. And I have a chronic major depression disorder.

And I'm not ashamed of any of that. None of that is my fault. Those are things that I live with and I have learned to manage and I really work through. I am here to be an example to the world to say like, you know, I had a fucking awful childhood. I have no contact. I have no contact with my terrible parents now. I tried really, really hard to reconcile with them.

I tried really hard to get them to understand with how they had made me feel. I tried really hard to heal together. And they just weren't having it. They are narcissist boomers who are just like, you're too sensitive. And that was kind of my entire life was just constantly being like, negged by my parents, you know, and gaslit by them? How dare you abuse me and then abuse me and then act like my responses to all of that aren't real? Like I, like, 100% know who I am.

I know where I came from. I know what happened to me. I speak up for the younger version of me who needed someone. to step up and say to my mother on the set, you're going to lose this kid if you keep doing this. You're hurting him. To answer that person who's like, what gives you the right? I have a right to my life.

I have a right to my honest, truthful experience. My first move wasn't, fuck you, I'm not having you in my life. My first move was, I am in so much pain and I really need to have a conversation with you about it. I did that. I sent that email. And in it, as non-accusingly as possible, I was like, these are my memories. And I feel like my dad doesn't even like me.

I want to talk about it. They ignored me. That was all I needed to know. Right. And like talking about it now, I don't feel angry. I don't feel resentful. I feel sad. I know what I have with my son.

My dad has none of that. He is missing all of it. He doesn't get any of the coolness that is me now. And honestly, I'm like, okay, that's super sad. Like, what a giant bummer. No one in my life made me feel the way my parents made me feel, and I don't mean that is a good thing. They made me feel terrible about myself.

They made me feel awful about myself. And I ultimately just decided, like, I deserve better than this. It is better for me to have no parents than to have these two terrible people constantly making me feel bad about myself. My father is just an asshole. He's selfish. He's cruel. He's a bully.

Nothing I was ever going to do was ever going to be enough for that man, ever. I know as a father the fact that my kids exist is enough for me like they get all my support even when I think what they're doing is really stupid I love them I'm their dad I don't I honestly don't know why he made the choices he made to treat me the way he treated me until I said you no longer get to do this to me you are no longer part of my life

but it was just like it's weird man setting boundaries that's such an incredibly important part of managing mental health and it's such an incredible part of having healthy relationships with with people um regardless of the the positivity or toxicity of the relationship like just setting up those boundaries it was really hard but i got to tell you it felt like it was like i left i walked out of the house I was trapped in the house with an abuser and I left. I walked out. I closed the door behind me and I didn't look back.

I'm in my late 20s and I have all this responsibility and I've been working really hard. But I never seem to be able to get ahead. We go to the airport and I'm just getting really anxious. I used to get super anxious about flying and I would go through like I would catastrophize everything. I was convinced the plane was going to crash. I was convinced that we were going to. to get hijacked, like just the more irrational and unlikely the event was, the more I was like absolutely certain it was going to happen. If I didn't touch the side of the plane before I got in it,

the plane was going to crash. If I didn't like play the news report in my head of them saying, you know, the plane went down, like the plane's going to crash. Like all that kind of shit. I'm just ready to explode because it's like nothing is working. Everything is off. Everything is weird. And I've learned that like for me, things not. coming together when I worked really hard for them was super triggering because guess what? I worked real hard to convince my dad to love me and it never worked. Right. It just it loops right back around. It's just out of control. It's out of control and it's embarrassing, but I can't stop.

Yep. I'm making a spectacle of myself. I don't remember anything specific. Right. I couldn't tell you exactly what happened. What I do remember is Anne saying and being really calm and Anne saying just sit down here, I'm going to go handle it. And when this is done, I really think we ought to get you some help. I was an alcohol. I am an alcoholic.

I'm sober. I quit drinking in 2016. But I was 100% self-medicating. 100% aggressively, enthusiastically self-medicating. Every night, for sure. Like, is it 5 o'clock yet? Like, you know, like, it's 4.30. I'm looking at my watch every five minutes.

It's like, it was pretty bad. Stopping drinking was really important for me. It was a really important part of my journey. It's a really important component of my, like, getting healthy. Once that self-medication was gone and they were gone, all that was left was the pain. And I had to work through that, and it was hard. I had to work through it for a couple of years. I'm still working through it.

The absolute worst, hardest, like molten lead-pouring pain. of it, I seem to have gotten through that part of it. And what's really left is like, it's like an injury where if you like, I don't know, you have like a pulled muscle or something from a really long time ago and you like step funny. You're like, oh, God, that hurt. Every now and then something happens. Every now and then I get some kind of like trigger. And it's like, oh, there's the molten lead again. But in, but in general, it is, you know, it's, I don't think I will ever be completely healed, completely whole in my entire life. I think that little part of me that really wants a mom and dad is always going to be sad and always going to miss that. But I am so in charge of my life now

that no matter what happens, it happens because like I chose for these things to happen. And I worked really hard to make these things happen. I had two big steps in my life towards getting healthy and getting and just like becoming me. Step one was getting treatment for my mental illness and step two was getting sober. Without that like escape hatch, I had to really confront the absolute fundamental reality of my life. Depression manifests itself physically. me. I feel like, you know, when you go to the dentist and they take x-rays and they put that lead thing, that big lead, heavy lead thing over your body to protect your organs from x-rays. So like, imagine that, except it's draped over your entire body. So you're like, you're like,

you're like wearing the Charlie Brown ghost outfit, only it's made entirely out of lead. And it just weighs you down. That's how I feel. I feel it pulled down the corners of my eyes. I feel a heaviness in the back of my jaw. I used to have night terrors. I would be falling asleep and I would have a panic attack every night. And I would be in absolute terror every single night. And I knew. And it was one of the reasons I drank so much. I was like, well, if I could just like drink enough, I won't feel this and I won't wake up. When I realized I was having panic attacks in my sleep, naming it, made it stop. So I love that thing that's in literature where like, if you are confronted with a demon and you name the demon, it loses its power over you. And I think

that that same thing happens with mental illness demons. So I've got my checklist of things that I do, right? Like, when's the last time I ate? Have I taken a shower today? Okay, be honest. Have I done any kind of exercise? Have I like, even if it's just walking, literally walking across the street and back. Like, that's good. That's getting outside. Like, when is the last time I ate? When's the last time I drank water? I have gotten to a point in my depression now where I can feel it and I go, okay, I know what's going on. I went to a psychiatrist. He just said, let me help you. Just let me help you. He said, I, I want to try an antidepressant and it's just for three weeks and then just come back and we'll see how it's working. And one of the very few things my mother expressed an incredibly strong opinion about that didn't seem to waver with circumstance.

was that medication was bad. One of the reasons I am so open about this, and I speak so unashamedly about it, I suffered, Miami. I suffered for like 15 years longer than I needed to because I was so ashamed. He started me on a medication. I would say it was probably six or seven days later.

Anne and I were on a walk in the neighborhood. And for the very first time in my life, I could hear the birds singing. There it is. This is a thing. I was aware of the beautiful flowers in our neighbor's yards. I could feel the crispness of the air. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my skin.

I could feel all these things that I had never felt before. And I turned to Anne and realized, And I said to her, I have just been existing. This is gone. The comparison I used was like I had been inside this room where there were no lights and like Swedish death metal, like cranked up to 11. I had found the door out of the room. Like adjusting the medical balance of my brain. So I said to her, all that's left is the ringing in my.

my ears. And I'm aware of it's not there anymore. And being aware of it not being there, I just started to cry. I felt so relieved. I felt so good. I felt so free. And getting the chemicals in my brain worked out made it possible for me to start working with an individual therapist who could help me through my PTSD. What? I worked through with therapy and what I realized is that the man who was my father gave me two things. He gave me his rage and he gave me his shame. Yeah. And what I have worked on as an adult is not carrying that. Right. Identifying moments where that starts to bubble up and actually say to myself, that's not me. That's that terrible person who I ended contact with. And I get a mental

picture of wrapping it up. Everybody does their own thing. Right. In mine, it's like when you wrap something up and lots of plastic, you know, like that really satisfying plastic that clings to itself. Yeah. So I wrap it all up in that and then I throw it away. I am doing my very best to be the person I need in the world. Wow. I needed someone to say, buddy, you're okay. You didn't do anything wrong. It was always them. It was never you. You weren't a troubled teenager. you were a teenager. You were a teenager whose father hated him and bullied him and beat up on him all the time.

It's not your fault. It's not easy to come up with an excuse to not go to therapy. And if someone's just not going to go, they're just not going to go. Here's the thing. It really does help. And if you are willing to love yourself enough to take a chance to go to someone who went to school for a really long time

and worked really, really hard to understand the psychological underpinnings of why you're struggling, if you're not willing to go have that person help you, you're going to have a really bad time. You're going to continue to suffer. It's okay to ask for help. And this is the thing.

Like, if you had a broken leg, you wouldn't just walk on it until it stopped hurting. If you had a broken leg, you wouldn't just stop walking. You would like, go get help and like get it set and get it healed and maybe work through physical therapy. You would do the same thing with mental health. But I don't want to give the impression to anybody listening that this is like, oh, it's super easy.

There's nothing tricky about it. It's just a little trick. Like it's not like that. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of work. You know, you can't cure mental illness, but you can super manage it. And you can super heal some of the, um, if maybe, maybe most of the like collateral damage that it inflicts on your life. Thank you for joining us for this little bite-sized episode of Myambialics breakdown.

If you like what you hear, rate, review, subscribe. Visit us on Instagram at Bialic Breakdown. And make sure to tune in on Tuesday for a new full episode of Myambiolix Breakdown from our bite-sized breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. down she's gonna break it down for you she's got a neuroscience phd or two one fix you one and now she's gonna break down she's gonna break it down