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

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Wil Wheaton is a well seasoned actor, recognized for his work on The Big Bang Theory, Stand By Me, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and countless other classics. He joins us this week to talk about his lifelong battle with depression and anxiety. Mayim dives into the neuroscience behind depression and explores the importance of social support. Wil shares about growing up in the industry, his tumultuous relationship with his parents, the unexpected way he met his wife Anne, and the breakdown that leads to him getting help. BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I had to really confront the absolute fundamental reality of my life, which is my dad doesn't love me and never did. And my mom never protected me from his abuse. And my mom used me. Hello, my name's Will. I have imposter syndrome. Hi, I'm Miami Amiolic and welcome to My Breakdown. This is the place where we break down the things that make you break down.

It's My Ambialic's Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. So break down. She's going to break it down. We have a very exciting episode. We're going to be breaking down depression.

And you might think, well, that's not exciting. But the ability to understand depression, which impacts so many millions of people, is very, very exciting. And depression's one of those terms and diagnoses that gets thrown around all the time. we have a really fantastic guest with us. Will Wheaton is going to be joining me to talk about his experience with depression, his experience with coming from a home of child abuse and trauma, how that contributed to his depression, and what works for him and what his optimism looks like, even given the fact that he comes from such a darkness, you know, that he was raised in. It's an interesting way to approach this conversation. And I'm very,

excited to be talking to Will. You may know him as Sheldon's nemesis on the Big Bang Theory, if you don't know who Will Wheaton is. Most recently, I got to work with him on the Big Bang Theory, but he has a long and really beautiful, interesting career that began, many of us saw him in Stand By Me, but he's a blogger, he's a gamer, he's a really interesting internet presence and was really one of the people who helped me start this podcast and start my YouTube channel. So very, very grateful to Will. And you see these outfits we're wearing, today's green day. I'd like to introduce my co-pilot. It ain't easy being green, is it Jonathan Cohen?

It is not, maim. It is definitely not. Today the listeners are in for a treat. The viewers are in for an even bigger treat. That is true. If they are watching on the YouTube channel, they are going to see time and space melding in front of their very eyes because for reasons that cannot even be explained.

we are both in the past and the present simultaneously in this episode. They will be able to see how long my beard has gotten in just a few months. Let me take away the mystery. We interviewed Will Wheaton. We talked to him about depression. It was an incredible interview. But after Will started listening to our podcast, he loved the humor that a lot of the guests were bringing to it. And he felt that he didn't present his full Will self in talking about depression.

So he asked us if we were. would redo his interview. And in the most compassionate, loving, mental health supportive way, we said, yes. However, the introduction which we filmed, we liked so much and we don't want to film it again. So that's what Jonathan's talking about. You're going to see us from the original interview with Will Wheaton doing the intro. And then we're going to cut to these outfits for the interview now and finish out the episode that way. And one additional piece for people who are watching You will notice that I'm not in the same room as mine for this episode. Jonathan does not, for those of you following along,

Jonathan does not live in Los Angeles or as he says full time. He lives north. I live in a cave in the woods. He's our caveman. You will see that he's in a different location. But we're having all the same fun. I mean, it's not as much fun as having you here in person for many reasons. But we're all finding a way to cope.

All right. Are we ready to bend time and space? Let's break down depression. Let's do it. Okay, so let's break down depression. I'm going to limit our conversation today to clinical major depression. There are other kinds of depression besides major depression. So there's something called seasonal effective disorder, which is, I mean, to super simplify it,

it's people who get very, very depressed when there's not enough sunshine. And many people only learn that they have seasonal effective disorder when they move somewhere that actually has winter. And this depression sets in, which is, It can be very, very profound, and it is specifically seasonal effective disorder. This is why Canadians don't get excited. There's also melancholic depression. That's a different kind of depression. Melancholic depression is the kind that we poets and artists get.

It's that sort of sitting and almost reveling in the dismay and depth of sadness. And it can produce a lot of great art. Some of my best poetry is in that state. Existential philosophy. Existential philosophy will also, it can also produce melancholic depression. There's also something called agitated depression. And this can look a lot like anxiety, but there's usually a deeper underlying current of depression that is, it is motivating kind of a heightened kind of depression. It can also look like immense irritability. There's also postpartum depression. I'm listening all the different kinds of depression.

Postpartum depression is specifically depression after you give birth. It's different from baby blues. and we'll talk more about these distinctions, it is very, very normal. I mean, it's in the normal spectrum of the hormonal shift that happens when you have a baby to have a depressed mood. And by that I mean a mood that is lower than average, normal, what you're used to.

But postpartum depression is very, very different. There's also a special kind of premenstrual disorder, which often has features of psychotic depression. I know what you're thinking. No, I don't have that. No, I was thinking, this isn't like bingo or you're trying to get all of them, right? Do you have bingo?

Jonathan, do you need to yell bingo? I have bingo. Not a joking matter, depression. But I did want to just sort of lay out that there are different kinds of depression. But we are talking about major depressive disorder. It's sometimes called MDD or unipolar depression, just depression, meaning depression without mania. And I'll clarify one more thing, which is the reason that we're breaking down all these

different terms and listing the different types of depression is because people can feel badly in a lot of different ways. Correct. And while they have a similar classification or similarity between those experiences, they are not the same. So for almost every syndrome in mental health, also, clinicians will look to a few things to decide, like, if you've got the thing. Again, to satisfy the insurance companies. So depression is a global umbrella term for a state of mood or a state of mind. And the diagnosis is typically arrived at by a set of symptoms or indicators that you use.

satisfy. Doctors will ask things like, have you stopped eating? Are you not eating as much? Have you started eating a lot lately? Have you had any significant weight changes? And now, obviously, you can have weight change for a lot of different reasons. But this is put together with all the other questions they're going to ask you. They'll ask if you're sleeping more or less than usual, both of which can be signs of depression. More commonly, you'll get sleeping more. But that also could be your thyroid. It could be a lot of things. Again, this is a, you know, a collection of symptoms. They'll also ask, when assessing for depression, if you are experiencing feelings of hopelessness, or you might be asked if you've thought about hurting yourself,

or even if you've considered if there's a point to you existing. So those are the kind of questions that they'll ask. You know, depression's not the kind of thing where they can draw your blood and know that you've got it. You can't step on a scale and have them take your temperature and, you know, scrape the inside of your mouth and say you've got it. this is a, in many cases, a self-report kind of situation. The medical field generally will ask two things to kind of assess whether you actually qualify for this diagnosis.

And this goes for really any, pretty much any mental health challenge. How long has it lasted and to what degree is it affecting your life? And they'll ask that for anxiety. They'll ask it for obsessive compulsive disorder. They'll ask it for depression. They'll ask it for mania. They'll ask it for alcohol use. They'll ask it for change in sex patterns or sex behavior.

This is not an exact science, if you haven't guessed, but you will be asked things like, how long has this been going on? And if you've felt depressed for a day, we don't know what that is as a medical community. We don't know what that is. It could be a crummy day. It could be a hormonal shift.

And especially if you're a female between the ages of 13 and 93, it could always be something hormonal that no one ever studied because women's health wasn't prioritized in medical school. But I think what's sometimes more interesting to me when we break these things down is not so much, do I have depression or not? But rather, if I don't meet the criteria, what is it? What is it? Because it's extremely frustrating for you to feel like there's something wrong.

And they say, sorry, that's not it. Because it's not that simple. It's got to be something, right? And that's really where I think, you know, mental health becomes the most fascinating. There's a difference between feeling sad and being sad. You might feel hopeless for a particular reason. You may have just experienced a significant change in your financial status. You may have lost a job.

You might be experiencing grief. That's interesting. Isn't that depression? Actually, no. It might become depression. clinically speaking, but those things are actually not the same as depression. So what are the biggies? When we talk about the big five, death, divorce, moving, natural disasters and trauma, meaning, God forbid, you know, a significant car accident, abuse, God forbid a sexual assault,

those kind of things. So those are the big five. So the brain and the body have a way of saying, whoa, this hurts. This hurts a lot. That's a normal reaction. It is your brain's job to send chemicals called neurotransmitters throughout your body, through your brain, through your body, when you've experienced something enormous. It's a sort of contraction. It's, you know, grief, sadness, loss, overwhelm. Those are reactions to big things that happen. And as animals, it is normal to want to retreat and isolate.

Why? Because if you're constantly spending energy, that energy is not used then for healing. And look, keeping busy can be a very good distraction from grief, from all these things. But as human beings, not human doings, we are made to heal. And your metabolism gets all out of whack when you're retreating because it's supposed to be. You're supposed to be sitting in an emotion as a response to those things. Yes. When you say the word heal, I want to give a little bit of caveat to that.

It is the slowing down of the body to provide reparative functioning. Correct. Well, and also there's an element here of you're repairing your soul. There's no unicorn fairy dust here. This is that the body has a way to regenerate your resources. And you can call it, you can call it, you know, a metabolic reset. You can call it a hypothalamic shift. You can call it a return to homeostasis. But, you know, what we hippies call it is, is recentering, you know, and resetting. In our current society, we get hit with events. and we can feel sad or down, and we can feel flooded and paralyzed and incapacitated, but we don't have time for those feelings. So when people are like, oh, people didn't use to be depressed, what is it about our culture? That's what it is.

It's our culture. We do not have time to process. There's no real appreciation even, especially in Western culture. There's really no appreciation for that. We got kids to raise. We got a job. We got a social calendar.

Do we got to add heart emojis to everything on Instagram? Those heart emojis will not add themselves. But seriously, there is a lot of evidence to support that the more information technology has proliferated the less downtime we've had. And that has had a massive negative impact on our well-being. So when we have sad feelings and those persist kind of unchecked and when we don't have support from a community, which homo sapiens in particular and actually primates, We are made to live in communities where, like, no joke, the reason that primates constantly groom

each other is because it releases vasopressin and oxytocin. It releases bonding hormones. It feels good. There's a reason that hugging can feel healing. The chemicals in your brain that are trying to regulate all of these things when big things happen, those can become unbalanced. The brain is a, you can think of it like a computer. I much prefer, because I'm a million years old, like the most complicated intersection of

freeways you've ever seen. You know, the kind that like loop around and they make all those shape. Those are the feedback loops of your brain. So what happens is those negative hormones when left unchecked and without input from hormones that are supposed to make you feel better, those you get into a loop and you literally keep going round and round. And what happens is those feedback loops can essentially burn out. One of your favorite chemicals, you, you, all of you, is serotonin. Serotonin's that happy hormone. It is the feel-good hormone. If you've ever heard of an SSRI, a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, that's one of the classic antidepressants. And what it does is it targets depression by not letting serotonin burn out and not letting it run out. So what it's

doing with those kinds of drugs, which are typically the ones that are best received, by the most people with the least side effects. I'm doing this. It's a lot of air quotes. Sorry, it's a lot of air quotes. I'm doing that, though, because SSRIs don't work for everyone. They don't work for all kinds of depression. They don't work for everybody.

Sometimes side effects are horrible, and you can't be on them. But statistically, statistically, SSRIs do tend to work. True clinical depression, for those who are living it, is not just being sad. I just want to be really clear. It's not like cheer up. It's not even like grieving. It's a persistent nagging depression of mood where there is a veil of darkness and misery covering everything.

And even if you have a great job and a loving partner, even if your work situation's awesome, depression robs you of the ability to feel pleasure. And yes, depression can be triggered by specific circumstances, but the insidious nature of depression is that it will rob you of the lens of hope and the lens of possibility. Depression at its most destructive tells you that you don't need to exist, that there is nothing beyond this.

This is that kind of darkness. This is, I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. That's depression. That's clinical depression. And we do have an episode specifically on suicide and suicidal ideation. But for people who have experienced that kind of depression, which enters into suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation, and even making a plan, the decision between killing yourself and not killing yourself doesn't really feel like a decision. It feels like a

statistical catastrophe. That's what it feels like to be depressed. Like you are the next statistical catastrophe and you are powerless over that. So I'm going to give one example. My father, bless his memory, died about five years ago. And I was very, very close with my father. And I was very, very sad. It was a very, very difficult disease that he had. And I often felt disoriented, especially in the days and weeks following, like not in my body, like shouldn't be driving. Even walking around would forget where I was. That was not fun. I stopped eating. And it's not even like, I mean, I wasn't hungry, but like no concept of time. I was constantly having nightmares, you know, like sleep was, it was so weird. I would wake up crying and it was terrible.

It really felt like everything was pointless. Everything bothered me. Everyone bothered me. That's called grief. That is grief. We are not the only animals that grieve. Even lower animals grieve. It is the brain's way of saying,

ouch, slow down and begin the healing process. Now, that's a depressed state, but that's different than depression. That's grief. And in our culture, we're really not comfortable with grief. I think generally speaking, we're not comfortable really with any emotion that might make other people uncomfortable. So many grieving people are given drugs. They're given drugs right away, antidepressants. And yeah, they help. I mean, as a person who studied neuroscience, I'll tell you, they raise your tolerance for the normal goings-on of life.

You can, I'm not saying it's easy, but yeah, you are more likely to get back to work quicker if you're on an antidepressant, you know, generally speaking, assuming that you respond to it. In our normal state of existence, though, we need to recalibrate. It is a necessary part of our grief. Being sad, grieving, having overwhelming feelings, even feelings that feel debilitating. That's the brain's natural reaction to significant events, often of a traumatic nature. And that reaction causes changes in your body and your brain. And that's designed to help us heal and experience feelings. And a lot of people don't want to experience feelings.

And I totally get that. But if those feelings persist, they often. will increase in intensity and it can lead to unipolar depression. It can lead to classic clinical depression. If you're not moving out of it, if the grief doesn't lighten, if you're not able to process and move on after a certain period of time. So that will depend. And this is also a question. Like, you go to a doctor's office and you say to the doctor, you know, doctor says, how are you feeling? And you say, well, my father died. Or maybe you say, my wife left me. Maybe you've been evicted. Maybe you lost your job. A A doctor trained in traditional Western medicine will say, I can make that feeling go away.

I can make you feel better. It's not that they don't know. We all do respect to doctors, especially doctors in underserved communities. Doctors who, you know, I was raised at Kaiser, you know, where you just like, you got your appointment. You didn't even know what doctor you were getting. You got in, you had 10 minutes, like make it happen in those 10 minutes. They're not going to say to you, oh, that's your body's natural response to situations

that are out of your control. Come back in three to six months if it hasn't really shifted. And you need therapy. You need a support group. You need people around you. Are you exercising? Are you doing that? Like, that's not what happens in most of our experience at the doctor.

So what they'll say is take this pill. And then you stop complaining, right? And a lot of people have said to me, why wouldn't you take that pill? Or you keep complaining. You just do it in a happier way. No, but a lot of people would say. And look, I mean, I had two kids without drugs. And a lot of people said, why wouldn't you?

And for some of us, the answer is the side effects are not worth it. the anxiety from the potential side effects are also not worth it. I'm not just talking about birth. I'm talking about even with these medications, but it's the other things that no one is helping us do. So what do we do? What do you do at a funeral or a way? You drink it away, right?

You drink it away. You smoke it away. You can numb out on tabloids. You can numb out with reality shows scrolling on your phone just because it feels good not to think about your sad feelings. My thing is real crime documentaries. And the thing is with those numbing techniques, is it doesn't really change the underlying feeling. Correct. Now, does that mean you can go on

and have happiness again? Absolutely. I'm not going to say that, like, I psychically, cosmically know that unless you heal the way I want you to, it's not going to work for you. But in the absence of therapy, in the absence of the kind of support that our ancestors have had and that, you know, homo sapiens and other primates have, in the absence of all of those things. In the absence of just taking the time. Correct. To allow yourself to have the experience, to feel badly, to have it shift, to have it lighten. What I've learned over the years, as I've managed my depression and live with depression, is that there are simple things that can help us. There are things that help us cope better and feel better and move through things better. But let's talk to Will Wheaton,

because Will Wheaton is a wonderful person to talk to about lots of things, but specifically about depression. Let's talk to Will. Let's talk to Will. Take it down. My NBi Alex 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.

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Hi, Will. Hi. Welcome to us bending space and time. Always a pleasure to bend space and time. with anyone, but particularly with you. So I'm going to embarrass you. Wow, that's going to be tough. I'm going to read your bio because I, I mean, I'm going to talk through your bio.

So I first saw you as many did in Stand By Me. And I'm 45. And how old does that make you? I'm 48. I'll be 49 in July. Okay. So, yeah, you're a handful, but not many years older than me. Yeah, we're in the same generation.

Right. But you were a couple years older than me. And when I saw Stand By Me, that was with you in River Phoenix and all sorts of other people. It was a, you know, a very, very special kind of coming of age story that touched a lot of people. You know, I would say it was the first, it was the first of that genre for many of us, in particular of this generation, to see childhood and brotherhood, you know, and friendship shown that way. It was a very, very significant movie for many of us. and obviously for your career as well. You went on to Star and Star Trek,

the next generation, for how many years? I was a regular for like three and a half, and then I reoccurred for another three. Wow. You're also, you're a writer. I am. You are a blogger back in the days when we were called bloggers.

I'm one of the original. Yes, you are an OG blogger. You're also an avid gamer. You're a, a, a, a, self-prevest geek, as we can see from just the things behind you, really. Yeah. I'm coming to you live from my game room. Live from the geek dungeon.

Yeah. And also our connection and really the reason you were literally, the first person on my list of people to speak to for this podcast, is that you've been incredibly open and honest about your mental health experience and in particular about depression in a way that really was the inspiration for me just starting to be open about it on social media or you know. I didn't know that. Yes. So I've worked with NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, literally as a client of theirs, meaning I use, I use their services for support. And so I always, you know, as many of us did, kind of tucked mental health away, you know, like you kind of tuck it away and you just say like, life's hard, you know, when you're in front of the camera. And like, well, yeah. 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, particularly by my mother really downplayed 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. Right. It's funny how that works. 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.

Right. So we'll get to that. And also for those of you who are watching closely, we had years together on the Big Bang theory, which was really, really an enjoyable place to get to connect. with you and get to know you and and also you know it's where a lot of you know kind of this shared vulnerability I think developed you know not just between us but for me understanding how you present yourself and the bravery with which you do that really has been you know an incredibly huge part of my journey and also we do share you know we share a lot about our childhood we share a lot about

conflict in our families which we'll get into so just so we can sort of frame you where do you grow up. What's your sibling story? What did your parents do? You know, what's your, what's your two-minute who's Will Wheaton before we know who Will Wheaton is? I'm the oldest of three children. My brother's four years younger than me. My sister's six years younger than me. I grew up in the northeastern San Fernando Valley in a little tiny foothillow community called Sunland, which was very much the frontier of the valley in the 70s when I lived there. I've lived in the 818 so long. I've lived in the 818 so long. I was in the two one three before we got the overlay. That's a super deep cut.

That is a deep cut. Listen, just like pour one out for Brody. That is a straight up Brody reference that only he would care about. And when I was seven years old, my mother made me become a working actor. She coached me to go into her agency and sit down with the children. Children's agent, who was your agent for a while? That's right. For my whole childhood, yeah.

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. If she couldn't be famous herself, she could be the momager of a famous kid. She was successful with me. She tried it with my brother. She tried it with my sister.

It didn't work out with either of them. really with me. So anyway, so she sort of coached me and I kind of went to the agency and I sat down and actually had lunch with my first agent to get the true story because 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 because it made me feel totally, totally crazy. But I sat down from her and I said, I want to do what mommy does. I'm seven years old. I want to do what mommy does. Okay, well, read this audition copy.

Okay, now you're an actor. Like, it was that fast. A year of the coronavirus has made me really question the way we understand an interpret time. But, you know, as a kid, that's weird. Like, entire months can feel like an afternoon and you just don't know through memory. But 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. Can I please just be a kid? So when was standby me? How old were you? I turned 13 during production. So that was a lot of years.

Yeah. I mean, five years. of childhood is a long time. And I worked a lot. I was in tons of commercials. You could do a commercial in those days and then buy a house off of the commercial. And my mom had successfully done that, had been in a commercial that was one of those buy a house commercials. And I think just, it's a drug, man. Like you touch that and it's just like, oh my God. It's like winning the lottery. And you're like, well, I have to play again. I got to get everybody to play. You could buy two houses. That's right. Yeah. And yeah. So, yeah.

So I did Stand By Me when I turned 13 during Stand By Me. Right. And at that point, I mean, it was just like, it all blew up. And none of us were ready for that. Yeah. I mean, so Beaches came out the week of my Bat Mitzvah, which would have made me 13 at the time. And so it's interesting. You get it.

Well, I hadn't been in the industry that long. I'm a later bloomer. And I initiated it. You know, in my case, I love school plays. And I was like, I think I'm really good. I'm not intimidated by our, you know, stern drama teacher. Like, I thrive on making people who don't like me, like me. This is what I should do for a living.

Sorry, it tells you a little bit about where I came from. Anyway, there's kind of that moment, it sounds like that was that moment where literally everything you knew as your normal shifts, you know? And that doesn't mean that you move into a world of abnormal or, you know, I just mean that everything that you thought you understood about your place in the world, you know, who directs what, what money is, what is, is, like that all shifts. And it sounds like we had a very similar experience. So, I mean, at that time in our lives. So do you remember, I mean, obviously, we both grew up at a time when we didn't call it anything, you know, I think my grandmother used to say she was

feeling blue. And what that actually meant was like clinically depressed. But do you remember, as a child, you know, do you have a time frame for that? Like, do you remember? I mean, obviously, when you, when you come from the kind of house, you know, that it sounds like you came from, a lot of this kind of blends together, you know, in terms of not feeling right. But do you have a distinct moment where you were like, I think I'm depressed? Well, I mean, when I was a teenager, I was, I felt really sad a lot of the time. I felt lonely. I felt like an outsider. And I, 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 what was just described as like sad,

but where it really expressed itself and where my depression. So I have, these are my disorders. I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder from my father's abuse. I have generalized anxiety disorder. Gad, as we call it. And I have a chronic major depression disorder. Got it. 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. But when I was in my 30s, my wife, Anne, after I had a complete, like, out of control, out of body experience meltdown at the airport, my wife was like, I love you. and I'm super worried about you, and I see how much you are suffering.

And after this trip is over, I really want you to talk to a doctor to see if we can get you some help. Okay, so hold on. First of all, there's so many amazing things in what you said. When did you meet Anne? Saint Anne, really.

It isn't, you know this because you know me, but your audience probably doesn't. The best part, listen, I have a great life. I have an incredible, comfortable, super successful life. I love my life. And Anne is the reason I love my life. Anne saved me and made me a whole person.

The best part of being Will Wheaton is being married to Anne Wheaton. I met Anne when I was 23. So I'll skip up through the rest of the stuff. So stand by my happens. I become famous. It's weird. I don't like it. The fame and the attention of fame

is incredibly important to my mother. She basically starts pimping me out to teen magazines. And I keep saying, I don't want to do this, but no one hears me ever, right? Until I get to Star Trek, the cast of Star Trek hears me. The cast of Star Trek becomes my family. I experience unconditional love. I experience acceptance and nurturing and kindness, and it's amazing. The producer is exactly like my father.

The producer is constantly undermining me, constantly nagging me, does a thing that is the most unforgivable sabotage of a young actor's career just because he could. And that is why I quit Star Trek because of what he did to me. Do you talk about that? Yeah. So I had been cast by Milo Schoorman in Valmont. I was supposed to go to Paris and work on this movie. And the movie was going to film during hiatus.

And they needed me for one week into the first week of Perkins. production to, you know, there was just, they couldn't make the schedule work out. So my people, the team is like, you know, we need to like work something out. And he says, well, listen, we're shooting the next season of Star Trek out of order. We're shooting the second episode first. And it's a just, it's a Wesley episode. It's all about Wesley. We can't shoot around him.

So we don't do the movie. We tell them we can't do it. I get ready for an episode that's entirely about me. I know what's coming. I am written out of it a week before production. A hundred percent entirely completely written out of it. So I quit. And I'm in the wilderness for a little bit.

And I'm really loving it. I need to be in the wilderness. And it's great. And my friend Stephanie is having a party on New Year's Eve in 1995 and is like, come to my party. And I say, I don't want to come to your party. I'm staying home alone and going to bed early. And I'm a hermit.

And I love it. great. I'm 23. And she's like, okay, fine, I guess. About a half an hour later, a mutual friend shows up at our house and he says, you're coming to Stephanie's party. Let's go. So I get in his car and go to Stephanie's party. Meanwhile, Stephanie has told a bunch of women that she works with. Hey, come to my house. I'm having a New Year's Eve party. And her friend, Anne says, I'm not coming to the party. I don't want to go to the party. It's, I'm not interested. She's like, but just come. You'll have fun. And Anne's like, well, fine, but I'm just wearing a baseball hat. and like not doing myself up.

I don't care. I'm wearing jeans. I don't care. I'm going to go have a good time and be mad about it. And Stephanie's like, okay, whatever. Now, I've been after Stephanie for months to, like, introduce me to her, like, cute friends from work, like, so we can hook up.

Like, I'm not interested in any kind of relationship. I just want, you know, I just want to hook up. Well, she's certainly not going to introduce me to Anne who has two kids and doesn't do that sort of thing. I'm at the party. One of Stephanie's roommates is hitting on me, and I don't realize. it. I absolutely don't get it. I think she's talking to me about being an actor. And I think we're having a conversation about being drama nerds. Apparently, I'm the only person in the room who doesn't

know she's hitting on me. And my friends still make fun of me about this. This is now almost 25 years ago. So I'm like, okay, great. So I step out onto the balcony to like catch my breath. And I see this woman and she's walking in and she's wearing a baseball hat and jeans. And she's not all done up. And I'm like, huh, I'm going to marry her. Like, that's just the thing that I thought. It was weird. And you know me, my am. I do not believe in anything supernatural. I am disdainful of the supernatural. I'm like aggressively anti-supernatural. But that is a thought that I sincerely, legitimately, genuinely had in my head that I never had. That's not like a thing I thought all the time. Right. And then I got real nervous and hardly talked to her at all the entire night. At one point, our friend Stephanie went over to Anne and said,

I think my friend Will likes you. And it's like, whatever, he's not talking to me at all. And midnight came around and neither one of us kissed anybody or anything like that at all. About a week later, I asked Stephanie if she would just invite her friend to Ann over so we could hang out together. And also, just going to insert this, Anne was not a person who was a happily married parent of two. That's right. She was a divorced. Right.

I was just making sure. I don't want people to be like, Will Whel Whedon hits on women with children just because he wants to. Divorce, divorced single mother with two kids. Great. Just clarifying. They had just turned four and six. And we started dating. And I fell in love with them very quickly.

And I remember experiencing unconditional love from somebody that I loved unconditionally for the first time ever in my life. She is an exceptional woman. She's an exceptional woman. She's a remarkable woman. woman. She's made me a whole person. She's been with me every step of the way on this really complicated, really painful. She goes with you to hockey games. I don't even think I would do that. Well, that's why we're not married, Maya. Nobody inviting me to Stephanie's party. I also like to stay home alone on New Year's. All the silly things you hear are 100% true. She is my best friend.

There is no other person in the world I want to spend being on lockdown with. There is no one in this world I wanted to raise children with. There's no one on this planet I am more excited about getting really, really old with. She's the other half of my heartbeat. Don't you have her heartbeat on your body? I do. Where is it? There it is. You can't, I can't, it's on a part of my arm. Yeah, there is. Yeah, we got it. Yeah. Ann and I were dating in my 20s, and I had, I thought I had saved all my money from being a child actor. and my parents had spent most of it. So I had that 15 cents on the dollar

that the state says they have to keep for us. And I used it to buy a house. I found myself with way more responsibility than someone in their 20s should have. Way more responsibility than I was prepared for. And I was not emotionally supported by my parents at all. They were scandalized that I was dating a woman with children. Sidebar, they have never accepted my parents.

children. And in case anyone thinks that I'm being unfair or unreasonable or maybe I'm too harsh on them, a real quick story. When my sister was pregnant at her baby shower, my mother sitting on a chair next to my wife, to whom I have been married for about 10 years at this point, with whom I have raised two children. I can feel it coming. My mother, my mother says with just unbelievable. enthusiasm and just unbridled joy. I'm so excited I will finally have grandchildren. Yeah. So I had all this responsibility. And I felt like I couldn't say no to anything. I had to say yes to every job that came along because who knows which is going to be the one. Yep. Right? I've had the success as a child. And this is where my thinking is at the time.

I had not yet put together that the man who was 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.

Like, just to make that choice. Get me back to the airport. I get, I get sidetracked because I'm so just like, it's so weird, right? So anyway, so I'm like, I'm in my late 20s. I have all this responsibility. And I've been working really hard. But I can, I never seem to be able to get ahead. Anne's working really hard.

and we're barely surviving. So I'm going to go out on the road and go on this little tour with my friends Paulin Storm and Adam Savage. We're doing a series of shows called Woot Stock. It's really super fun. And I'm starting to think, well, you know what? Maybe I'm going to be like an indie performer now.

That's cool. I like that. I've always been into punk rock and DIY. And like, I love that. So like maybe I'm going to go off and I'm going to go on a small indie tour. And instead of having one big swing of the bat, I'm just going to put together a bunch of little base hits.

That's fine. I can totally do that. 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 catastrophicize everything. I was convinced the plane was going to crash. I was convinced that we were going 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 play went down, like the plane's going to crack. Like all that kind of shit. So hold on. So for those of you listening or watching from home, this is not a strong baseline to be working from when you're entering an airport. No. Like, it is absolutely not. This is not like, this is what recovery looks like.

This is like you were not in a great place. You're still like working through trauma. You're still like in it. Like this is PTSD stuff. This is like all the layers and layers. You know, this is like what I like to say is like when I wasn't on medication. That's a little bit what my experience was right. Okay.

The parallel to someone who's like, I got to get sober is like you are on the floor of a lower east side dive bar in 1981. And you roll over and realize how lucky you are. you didn't stab yourself on that needle that's on the ground. All right. So that's Will Wheaton in the airport. Keep going. Right. 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. So I lost my mind and I was like, let's go home.

Fuck this. We're not going. So wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Tell us what it looks like when will we, like, do you mean you're in an airport and you say to Ann? Yeah, we're at the Delta counter at L-A-X. Get real detailed. You're at the Delta counter.

You're in this kind of state. Did something happen or you were just like, I want to go home? There was something with our luggage. There was something with not getting on the plane in time. There was something about a delay. Got it. And we had given ourselves an incredible. incredible amount of time, way more time than a reasonable person should need. And it just wasn't

enough. What does it feel like? 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 really think we ought to get you some help. So what happened next? So you go do the trip. What does help look like?

We go on the trip. It's awful. Yeah. Well, I mean, I wasn't even going to ask because I know what those trips look like. And the thing is, I'm apologizing to her the whole time. I'm apologizing to Paul and Storm and Adam. I'm apologizing to everyone all the time. Then you add shame, the acronym should have already mastered everything, meaning like life.

Yeah. Oh, my God. So then you have that shame on top of it. 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. So I wrap it all up in that and then I throw it away. Take me from the delta counter to the plastic, meaning what did it look like to get help?

Did Anne say, let's go to a therapist? Did she say, I'm going to put you in an institution? Like, you need a pill. What did she do? We had people in our lives who had done some outpatient, therapy at like a mental health facility. You had not been in therapy up until now? I had been in therapy for my entire life.

This is what people are going to say. See, he was in therapy and it still didn't work. So tell us why that's not sure. So listen, listen, 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. 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. That's amazing. That's amazing what you just said. 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. So, yeah, I'm asking what's the difference between the therapy you had been in, which in some ways was not everything you needed and what happened when you got help after the Delta incident? We had been in family therapy.

Anne's ex-husband is a fucker. And he was making things real hard for our kids. And our oldest son, when he was seven, said, can we go, is there somebody who can help my dad be a better dad? And we were like, yes, that person's called a therapist. And Ryan was like, can we all go as a family to the therapist? And because the idea came from him, that was enough to get his shitty dad into, I should say his shitty bio-dad. I'm his shitty dad. I adopted both kids when they were, when they hit the age of majority.

They both asked me to adopt them at different times. So I did. And the therapy that I'd been, had really been like family therapy. It had been about like being a good period. It had been about managing his shitty behavior. It wasn't really focused on like, you are clearly traumatized and need some help. Got it. So it wasn't targeted for you in particular.

Right. Exactly. So what actually happened was I went to a. psychiatrist, he just said, let me help you. Just let me help you. He said, 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 medication. Correct. It was going to People who can't figure it out.

You're fucking with your chemistry. You should do it on your own. It's going to make you a zombie. It's going to be able to have sex. It's going to make you worse. And you're weak. I'm sorry. Those are the things.

Yes. Yeah. And the thing is like, and one of the reasons I am so open about this and I speak so unashamedly about it. And I've probably bored a lot of people by talking about this. We're bored right now. You just can't tell. Good.

Everything's going according to plan. One of the really big reasons about that is 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. I've written about this. This story is on my blog and I recounted this in a speech I gave to Nami in Ohio a few years ago. 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. Yes. 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 Ian and realized, and I said to her, I have just been existing. This is gone.

This thing is gone. And the way that I, the comparison I used was like, I had been inside this, this room where there were no lights and like, like Swedish death metal, like cranked up to 11. All due respect to Sweden. I had found the door out of the room. the like adjusting the medical balance of my brain so so i said to her all that's left is the ringing in 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 and really focus on, 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, you know, for sharing at this level. And that's one of the best descriptions I've heard of that veil lifting. The science of it is that in unipolar depression and major depressive disorder, in this kind of depression, it's essentially like there's a sock over the lens of your camera. Yeah. And you see through the sock, like I wouldn't even say it's like a panty hose.

You know, like, it's a sock. It's a nice wool sock. Well, okay. It's a warm, cozy, comfortable, right? And I say that I'm using your clothes. Right. It's a comfortable lens because part of the insidiousness of this kind of depression in particular is that it tricks you into believing this is it.

Meaning the ability that we have as humans to be able to step outside of that and say, wait a second. And it's like a little bit of a matrix moment. What if everything I've been experiencing is not true, meaning true to, you know, however you want to say it, your soul, your essence, your spirit, the way God intended you, you know, for people who use that kind of language. What you described is, you know, not that different. What I thought of when you described it is when people talk about certain experiences, in particular with psychedelics, where there's something that's removed that allows you to have access to different things. Or, you know, even with, like when when people talk about it, it happens with marijuana, you know, where your senses

feel so sharp. And it's like, oh, it's magic. It's actually not magic, folks. It's just science. And what it is is it's the removal of interference. And so we do that in a, you know, in a drug state, right, to be able to have access to all these different, cool, fun connections you can make. And like, ooh, it's so trippy. But as a human being, what you, you're describing is the ability to say, I was placed in an environment that created or contributed to a chemical environment that created a haze, a complete different lens with which I've been seeing the world. And part of that is believing, this is just me, sucks to be me, but how many years did I live, white knuckling it? And that's what you're describing.

Like you're literally like, I'll do it this way. I'll eat this. Maybe I'm not sleeping right. It's the wrong boyfriend. You know, like, I'm going to fix all the external things. Maybe I need a different job. I'm going to change jobs. I'm going to go to school.

I'm going to drop out of school, right? All those things we do. And the unfortunates among us sometimes say, let's drink it away. Let's eat it away. Let's screw it away. Let's work it away, right? Well, I mean, so this is probably a different topic. I think John Ross Bowie.

covered this beautifully. But 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. What did that look like for you? Were you like a, I'm going to wake up and drink? Were you like every night? Like, I mean, no judgment. Just ask every night. Yeah, no, every night. Every night. Every night for sure. Like, is it five o'clock yet? Like, you know, like it's 4.30. I'm looking at my watch every five minutes. Like, it was pretty bad. And that was another situation where Anne was like,

I'm super worried about you. I had two big steps in my life towards getting healthy 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, which is my dad doesn't love me and never did. And my mom never protected me from his abuse. And my mom used me. Right. So my mom is using me to make herself happy. Nothing I can do

as good enough for my father. Hello, my name's Will. I have imposter syndrome. Well, and also for people who may not have experienced specifically what you did, what you described is the human condition. He didn't love me right. She didn't love me the way I needed to be loved. He didn't support me. Like whatever it is, and typically it does start with our parents, even if we're not at the level, let's say, of abuse or trauma that you and I, let's say, know about, the notion that we are not always matched with caregivers who can love us the right way is incredibly painful and it impacts people differently depending on their genetic predisposition. You can even take twins. I will even go that far. You can even take twins and put them in the same situation. People are going to react

differentially, not just differently, but differentially to a mismatch. And your mismatch was indeed very, very significant. But that's what everyone at some level is dealing with, and some of us deal with it to greater extents than others. But that's such an important point. I'm going to say it just like one more time to kind of crystallize it, even for myself. Like, they didn't love me the way I wanted them to. And you could be talking about your parent, you could be talking about a friend,

you could be talking about a lover. That mismatch for some of us, for those of us with a predisposition, right? That mismatch can lead to a very, very, very. devastating cascade that really is like a snowball heading downhill. I mean, this has been so, so helpful, so interesting. The question I have for you, and it's completely selfish, so I wrote a, I wrote a screenplay after my father died, and screenplay, I'm just going to say it now, because I know my mom's listening, the screenplay is not an autobiography. It's, there are things in there that never happened. Like, it's fiction.

there are things that did happen and no one needs to know what those things were. So I'm just going to say that. I did the same thing, Ma'am. I did the same thing. You wrote a screenplay, I wrote a novel. Right.

So here's the thing, obviously. It's going to have an impact on people who know me or my family because they'll say like, oh, I remember when that happened. Oh, but did that happen? And like it's really nobody's business. I'm just like I'm here to say,

it really is nobody's business because I'm an artist and I created a work of art that, you know, all good art. has some truth. I don't know. I just made that up. Maybe Nietzsche said it. I don't know. There's no way Nietzsche cared about art at all. He was a nihilist. Okay. Sorry. He was disdainful of art. Okay, Ma'am, know your audience. Don't mention Nietzsche around Will we? He literally knows who he is.

Okay. So the question I have and the thing that... That's something Magritte would say. Okay. Enough with you and Magritte. This is not a pipe. Did I do it? Not a pipe? Okay, great. You did. The thing that is very, I'm going to say it, and you know that I have tremendous love for you. The thing that feels jarring for me that I would like you to help me with is you are a public person. I'm a public person. We are public people who have a very different platform of expressing unhappiness and exposing, potentially, our families, abuse, dirty sex.

secrets, mental health. What is it? And I'm not saying what is it that gives you the right. But where does it come from your sense of empowerment? I mean, let me finish. Empowerment, confidence, bravery. Because some people might say, you know what? Take it to therapy, Will. Are you seeking revenge? Does it feel good to do this? I'm asking you because you know that I care about you and I know so much about you. but I'd like you to explain really what it feels like and how those decisions get made about what you share, why you share, and the repercussions that it might have

on your parents who live in this world, right? And even your siblings. I never dreamed I would ask you that. I was like, I've been wanting to ask you, but I finally figure like, let's just do it. We're doing it. Okay, so listen, that can be summed up really, really simply. 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. And frankly, Mayam, if they experience negative repercussions for the way they treated me, so fucking be it. I know my life. I know my truth. I know my name is Stephen. Like I like 100% know who I am. I know where I came from. I know what happened to me. I know what happened what happened to other people. I know what happened to so many of our peers. There are kids we grew up with who didn't survive like we did. I speak up for those kids. 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. Nothing I've said is untrue. I've thought about that a lot. Like, I am so profoundly hurt by them. Part of me, there's a little part of me. He doesn't, he doesn't show up a lot. He doesn't activate himself and like grab the control stick in my life very often. But there is part of me that is so angry at them. Insulted and outraged are not big enough words. Right? Like, how dare you? How dare you abuse me and then abuse me and then act like my responses to all of that aren't real?

So there's someone listening. to this right now who is at the place I was three or four years ago feeling like I have tried so hard. Like 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.

I sent an email to my parents and I said, like, you can't have a conversation. You can't talk to them. they lie. And they twist things around. Right. And this kind of information is usually better delivered where they have time to read and process as opposed to cut you off and hear what they want. So I sent them an 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. My mother did not respond to me for four months. months, my father did not respond to me for six months. And when my father finally did respond to me,

the subject of the email line was, your mother wants me to email you. Wow. I didn't even open it. I didn't even open it. I just deleted it. 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 son Ryan and I are super close I adore him I will do anything for him and my daughter-in-law I will do anything for them

I love them so much we have such an incredible relationship and friendship and father-son relationship 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. I think it's important to say that in that moment of acknowledging where you decide not to open

that email, you're actually accepting them for who they are. Yeah. You're not trying to change them anymore. You're not trying to go back to the well. And a lot of people are like, oh, positive mental health is like you have to go bridge those relationships and you have to heal. But in some circumstances, and I'm not advocating one way or another to anyone. But for some people, you hit the point where you're like, the kindest thing to do to both sides is to recognize, I accept you for who you are. This is the reality of the situation. And I'm going to make a positive change for myself to set a boundary and protect myself. I'm glad that you said 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 people, regardless of the positivity or toxicity of the relationship.

like just setting up those boundaries. And I had tried to establish some boundaries. I haven't even talked about how the only time I ever heard from my parents for about 10 years was when they wanted something from me. They never called to see how I was doing. They never asked about my kids. It was never anything like that. It was always like, will you promote this thing for us? Will you do free voiceover work for us?

Will you make a video about this thing? Like, it was always like, do a thing, do a thing. when I was like, listen, I really, you're my mom and dad, I love you. Would you just call me to talk to me about me? Like, would you take an interest in me? And then it was no contact, just trying to establish boundaries. And that, not opening that email was, they don't respect me. They don't respect my boundaries. This is who they are. You're absolutely right. And it was really hard, but I got to tell you, it felt like I walked out of the house. I was trapped in the house with an abuser. And I love. left. I walked out. I closed the door behind me and I didn't look back. In that moment, what you do is you adjust the dynamic. You're no longer searching for their approval. You're no longer trying to make it right with them. And in being stuck in that dynamic, we're always waiting. Are they going to do, are they going to show up again? Are they going to act differently again?

And when you have a pattern, as you've described, where it's clear that that's never going to happen, you really do free yourself to make a better choice. And so it's just a powerful to hear that shift. And also, you know, you said a line earlier where you have to confront the fundamental reality of your life. You mentioned it when you were getting about getting sober. Yeah. In stopping the cycle of trying to go back to them, what ends up happening is that you're then left with the hurt and pain that is only yours to deal with. And you're not going back to them to help it resolve. So in some ways, like, really, that's where the healing takes it to the next level, where you're like, okay, this is what is, I have to hold on to those scars and you have to make amends with

them for yourself, not in an extra. Let's not use the amends word. I don't like that word. That's a different word. Like, not in the program sense. Not in the program sense. 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. But you are absolutely right. 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, 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 trigger. And it's like, oh, there's the molten lead again. 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. So my last question for you is, you know, kind of given all that, what is, you know, especially now that you've, once you take away, you know, whatever the addiction is, once you take that away or the, you know, what is your, what is your mental health regimen like now? Like, you take your medication. What else do you do? I take my medication every morning. I take two different pills and I just take them together and then I go along with my day.

Do you go to therapy still? I do. I don't need to go on a regular weekly basis anymore. I keep some notes when things come up and I've gotten really good at working through stuff on my own because I've spent so much time doing it. I do not recommend that for someone who doesn't have 25 years of experience doing it like I do. because, because, like, it's just, you're not going to get the help you need. I've been really fortunate. I haven't had what I would call, like, a depressive downturn in a while.

And the way that I describe that is, like, depression manifests itself physically in 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 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 remember your last depressive episode. Yeah, it was terrible. It was the last really bad one I had was a PTSD flashback. Brought on by seeing an actor we grew up with who had the most abusive mother I have ever seen in public. I saw him in a movie and it brought back every audition, every callback,

every day that I suffered and it was bad and it was weeks of me spiraling and struggling. But when that happens, like... You name it, you know how to name it. Yeah, I learned this thing. So 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. But I would like get this thing. And I, 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 know what's happening. I'll lean into my privilege, okay? So my privilege is, for the most part, I get to choose when I have to work.

So, like, if I'm in a place like that, I have the privilege of saying, okay, I'm just going to self-care as much as I can until I get through this. I talk to the therapist. I talk to Anne. And then it works out over... Do you meditate?

Yeah. Tell us. I do meditate. I use the Calm app. This is not an endorsement. I love that. I love their ads. Their ads always come up for me.

I love their ads. Yeah. Calm and Headspace are the two that I really like. And then I listen to this weird. There's a guy called on, well, I don't know if it's a guy. There's a person on YouTube called Nemo's Dreamscapes. And they make these wonderful videos of just like beautiful 1920s animation. And then the music, and then they have done this audio processing to the music.

So it's oldies, music from the 20s, 30s and 40s. But it sounds like it's playing in the other room. How cool. Where the fire is crackling and like the rain is raining outside. It creates this beautiful background of like a soft, gentle blanket of noise. I love that. Yeah, it's wonderful. I listen to it when I work now.

It's on pretty much all day long in my office. And it really helps. It really helps. It's really soothing. 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. I know that a lot of people might be listening to this and saying, well, here's the answer. I cut my parents out of my life. I'm like, it's going to be fine. And what you are described, is a decades-long journey of also partnering with a woman. Might get emotional here because I do love Anne. Partnering with a woman who you trust and who you place your sanity in her hands. She loves me unconditionally.

Correct. So I just want everybody listening at home to not be like, I'm cutting them out. That's it. I figured it out. because what you did was you did it in an environment where you were already primed to be ready to do the work. And another thing that I love about you, you're expressing that you quit drinking like recently. Like that's recently. When you're our age, four years ago is recently, right?

Five years ago was recently. Meaning all of the work that you did still brought you to the place where you weren't done growing. you weren't done learning and you're still in that place where I remember when we texted like it was bad when you had your last episode but like I'm in such awe of you that what you have now is you have a vocabulary you have tools and you have a sense of gratitude and optimism that I promise you if whatever it is if you cut your parents out if you cut him out her out whatever they are, if you do that with no other support. Oh, it's not going to work.

It's not going to work. It's going to hurt so bad. I'm just letting people know this is part of an entire package that is the unbelievable Will Wheaton. Thank you so much, Will. Thank you. Ma'am, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you. This is a good one. And look, and let me just say this in public.

When I was in real crisis and really suffering, I reached out to you and I reached out to Seth Green. And you were both there for me. You were there for me in a way that only other people who were there at the time could be there for me. And because you were there for me, I probably suffered the least that I needed to. And I'm just really grateful for it. And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to come back and do this with you a second time. I mean, there were so many like quotables in that episode. I just, there were so many things he said that. That were so powerful, but also I think that him describing all the things that he does, like he's a rigorous, rigorous, rigorous active participant in his mental health.

And not just by taking his pills. That's not what I'm saying. He's in a relationship that is constantly open to turning things over together, you know. And I know Anne, and it's really wonderful to see. And they did meet when he was very young, you know, he was still. growing up and they kind of have grown up together. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot in there. There's a lot in there. And I thought the stuff about him being a public person was also really fascinating. And I think a lot of people may be like, what? Still? But I just, I'm so glad that he was

that he wanted to share that with us. It's so important that he was able to talk like that. It's so hard to open those wounds and to share those painful experiences, not only from the past, but how he holds them now and how they're impacting him. One of my points that I was just like really struck by was this idea of the static around us impacting our senses. Totally. Static, the noise, whatever you want to call it, when that clears what we're able to experience, the birds, the sound, the skin.

No, I mean, it's absolutely, that's also science. Like, that's completely chemical. Our perception of pain is different. in a depressed state versus a non-depressed state. Everything that we experience is, I don't want to say clouded, it is colored by the chemistry going on in terms of our mental health. Like, that's true. Whatever you've ever experienced with drugs or alcohol, your body has the natural ability

to do that too, you know, to make things more interesting, real, connected, safe. You know, the safety that you feel when you numb out, that's a lot. safety is yours to own. And if you want to find out why you're using, stop using. Like, that's what he's talked about. I loved, I mean, I just loved it. Also on the trauma impacting our senses, it kind of creeps in over time. It's cumulative. Especially when it starts so young. And I wanted to have you talk a little bit about why it is that the lack of reciprocity in acknowledging of experience starts to create such turmoil for us. He talked about, obviously, gas lighting is a huge thing. I don't remember now if we've addressed it as a word of the day in an

episode. No. I looked at my script notes and I know it's on there and I don't know if it's on there because we did it or it's on there because we should. You probably were just thinking about it from your life. But what's the human need for acknowledgement? Because when we're not acknowledged in that way and gaslighting is obviously more than just not being acknowledged, but the need for us to have a shared experience to come together, what is that biochemical impact on us that makes it so detrimental if we don't have it? And so amazingly healing if we do, because part of the therapeutic process is coming together with someone else to have a shared understanding of whatever we're discussing. So remember when you were like, let's not talk too much in this conclusion

because it's been a really long episode. This is opening up something that I think is really for another episode, but I will say that in particular the connection between us with our primary caregiver, we are primates. Like, we're chimpanzees, we're orangutans, like, picture all of those social structures of animals. And while they may not have spoken language, that's the most important connection is that kind of community. And your caregiver, in particular, your mother, just going to say it, that primate connection and the sense of... of mismatch that occurs when there is a mismatch is chemically very, very upsetting and cumulative,

meaning that pattern once laid down is very easy to trip that wire. And that's where we get the notion of organizing principles. If your organizing principle is such that I'm too much, I'm not seen, I'm not heard, and I'm not cared for, and worse yet, I'm not, I'm hurt, I'm abused, I'm neglected, I'm used. That lays down a really, really rigorous organizing principles so that every other experience is basically compared to that.

And it takes a tremendous amount of work, which Will, I think, has hopefully made clear. It takes a tremendous amount of work. You don't undo that. You find ways that you live through it. Connection is so important. We talk about it all the time. and here's another example. Let's do an Ask MyManything.

Ask MyManything. Yeah. Ask MyManything today is from Alicia Lee, who submitted a video. And if anyone else wants to submit a video, they can do so at Biolik breakdown.com. That's BIA L-I-K. I'm sorry. I was thinking about how people are submitting videos. Dot com.

And there's a section where you can ask Myam Anything. Let's go to the video. Hi, Ma'am. My question is this. why do some people choose the discomfort of staying in addiction or disordered eating or toxic relationships instead of going through the discomfort of making the change and moving out of it into something healthier and happier? I'm fully aware of a lot of people who go to start getting the help and then the discomfort of attempting that drives some people.

them back into the behaviors that they were trying to get away from. And I'm wondering what the neuroscience behind that is. This is a great question. My ears kind of like perked up when our listener asked about why people choose. And I don't mean to get all like heady about like, what is choice? Do any of us choose anything? But the choice to turn away from growth and progress is not so much a choice as a, you know, it's a kind of compulsion to take the path of least resistance, even if it's painful. Jonathan, you want to chime in here? I mean, you have experience with this. I have experience and we've done a lot of research with other experts. And what they talk about is our neuro pathways are like ruts. And so when we experience pain, we go to the

solution, and that solution is down either a behavior pattern or a thought pattern. And when we reinforce it, those grooves become more instantiated. And so to try and recreate a different pathway and build a different system can be extremely uncomfortable. And especially until that new pathway gets instantiated, it will actually feel almost worse than getting, you know, the previous behavior or repeating the previous behavior, even if their previous behavior, even if the previous behavior leads to negative outcomes that you, after doing it, realize, wait a second, I'm here again and I really don't want to be, it's so hard to switch that circuitry. Right. And so, and another thing that I would add, very, very nicely done, by the way, I can tell

you've been listening to me when I speak. It's helpful. Something else that I'd like to add is that we don't like things that take time. Tell me a time in your life when you like that something, Well, actually, you know what? There's some things we like to take time. It just got weird. We don't like hearing. Do this. And next year, your life's going to be amazing.

Because we're very, very limited as humans. And that's the Homo sapiens sapiens part of us. We have an impatience that is in direct opposition to what we see as fun. It's not, I don't want to wait. I want it now. I want what I want, when I want it, how I want it. That's where it's not so much of a choice. It's what do we do to get through today? I don't like when today hurts. And if you don't have a lot of tools, if you don't have any tools, it's exceptionally hard. And if you don't have a lot of tools, or I'm just going to say it, if you don't have the right tools, you're like, there's no wrong tools. Yeah,

there are. There are wrong tools. If you don't have the right tools, if you are, if you are are not seeing that light at the end of the tunnel, you're likely not getting the right help or you're not ready to be open to the right kind of help because you need a lot of tools to work through that pain. And that pain is physical, it's emotional, and I'm going to say it, it's spiritual. Thank you to everyone who's submitted a question. And please do rate the podcast, give us a five-star review. Check out the YouTube channel. Click the little icon to subscribe. and come back for more. It's a great question, and thank you, Mime, for that awesome answer.

Thank you, Jonathan, for being part of it. Thank you also for your patience and to our producers and everybody working behind the cameras and microphones to help make this episode really, really special as we bent time and space. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you next time. It's Myon Pialyx breakdown.

She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down, so break down, she's going to break it down.