by Eiad Asbahi, Mindscape Founder and CEO

 

It’s World Mental Health Day, and this year’s theme is lived experience, real people saying what actually happened to them. Here is the only lived experience I can honestly speak to.

 

For forty years I didn’t know I had a mental health story at all. For most of that time I was in constant pain from my own mind and had no idea that was what was happening. I thought I was just a guy with a lot to prove, a short fuse, and a busy calendar.

 

Consumed by Harsh Self-Criticism

 

If you had asked me back then what was wrong, I would have handed you a list. Too short. Not enough hair. Wrong body. A kid who got laughed at in ninth grade, and a grown man who was still, somewhere, that kid. I kept the list the way other people keep receipts.

 

Underneath it was a single sentence I never said out loud, because saying it would have made it real: something is wrong with me. I didn’t think it, I knew it, the way you know your own handwriting. I wasn’t like other people. I was broken. Defective.

 

Where the Old Programming Started

 

Today, I understand where that belief came from. It got planted when I was ten, the year my parents divorced, which in a Syrian immigrant family was less a legal event than a public shame. I remember standing in my bedroom asking that exact question. What is wrong with me. It was like a stone hitting a windshield. One deep crack, and then over the years the webs spread out from it until you can’t see through the glass anymore, and eventually you forget there was ever a view.

 

So I ran, and I was very good at running. I ran into achievement first, because achievement is the socially approved way to argue with that core belief. Eiad Asbahi: straight A’s, valedictorian, medical school, a career where people used the word prodigy. From the outside it looked like a life going up and to the right. From the inside it was one hit of proof after another, each one wearing off faster than the last.

 

When achievement stopped working I ran into other things. I drank. I took things I shouldn’t have. I got angry at people who couldn’t have known they’d hit one of the places where I already felt most insecure. I blamed whoever was standing closest. I tried to control every variable in every room I walked into.

 

And when all of that failed, I did the thing I was best at, which was analyzing the data. I approached myself the way I approached a company I was determined to crack: gather the information, scrutinize every angle, find the pattern, isolate the problem. If I could just figure out what was wrong, I could fix it and get back to work. It never occurred to me that the figuring out was itself a way of not feeling anything.

 

I Had the Diagnosis Backwards

 

If any of that is familiar, I want to say the next part carefully. Every one of those behaviors had consequences, some of them hurt people, and I’m not proud of them.

 

But I had the diagnosis backwards. I thought the anxiety and the anger and the running were evidence that I was defective. I didn’t understand that they were symptoms of pain I hadn’t recognized yet.

 

I did go to therapy during those years, on and off for two decades, and I want to be honest about how I used it, because I don’t think I’m the only person who has approached therapy this way. I treated it like a pit stop. I’d bring in the symptom of the week, the fight, the panic, the thing I’d done, and I wanted it patched so I could get back on the road.

 

I never brought up that sentence, something is wrong with me. I didn’t know it was there to examine. Twenty years of that never touched the old programming, and I concluded that therapy didn’t work. Actually, what didn’t work was that I was trying to fix a car with paint, when the frame itself was cracked.

 

When I Ran Out of Road

 

I’d like to tell you I made some clear decision that it was time to change. What really happened is I ran out of road. My marriage ended, my career started coming apart in slow motion, and for the first time there was nothing left to run away into.

 

Discovering New Tools

 

A counselor pointed me toward a kind of therapy called Internal Family Systems, and it asked a question nobody had asked me in twenty years. Who in you is reacting right now? What is he afraid of?

 

I want to be plain about what happened after that. It wasn’t some huge breakthrough. The noise in my head got a little quieter. That’s all. But for the first time in my life there was some space between one thought and the next, and I could stand in that space for a few seconds without immediately reacting to the thought, fighting with it, or trying to escape it.

 

Later, ketamine widened that space for me, and it widened it a lot. It was a door for one man, and there are many other doors. Therapy opens it for some people. Antidepressants open it for others. Breath, movement, sleep, a good friend, meditation or another practice that helps the mind settle. Anything that gives you a little distance from the mental noise gives you a little room, and room is where a shift can start.

 

Getting Curious About the Voice

 

What I did with the room was get curious, which I had never once done before. Instead of arguing with the voice, I started writing down what it said, in the notes app on my phone, sometimes while I was still inside the situation that set it off. Then I took the notes into therapy and started tracing the reactions back to the beliefs underneath them.

 

I learned the voice had exactly one script. You’re too short. You’re too bald. She’s going to reject you. If you’ve ever turned an unanswered message into proof of something about yourself, you know this script even if your words are different. I once spent most of a day working up to sending a woman a text asking if she wanted to get together. I sent it. She never answered.

 

I knew exactly what the old script said was supposed to happen next: her rejection would confirm what I had always believed, that I was defective, unworthy. And I sat there waiting for the familiar collapse, the rush of shame and self-attack I had fallen into so many times before. But it didn’t come.

 

Sure, I was a little embarrassed, but I was fine. For the first time, I could see the mistake in the logic. She hadn’t answered my text. That was all I actually knew. It wasn’t proof that I was broken, and it didn’t have to become a verdict on who I was.

 

The old belief had told me that rejection would inevitably confirm there was something wrong with me, but it hadn’t. I started wondering what else it had been getting wrong.

 

When the Old Beliefs Started Losing Their Grip

 

I’m going to tell you something I’d rather not. For years I wore lifts in my shoes because a pickup-artist book told me to. I filled in my eyebrows. I built an entire outside to compensate for an inside I was sure was broken, and none of it worked, because you cannot out-groom a core belief. I’m telling you this because when I finally looked at the belief directly, the lifts came out of my shoes on their own. Nothing about my height changed. What changed is that I stopped treating my height as a verdict.

 

Here is how it shows up now, in ways that probably don’t sound very big, but really mean a lot to me. I can sit alone in my house on a Sunday night without the TV on. I used to dread Sundays so much I’d stay in bed to make them shorter. I can be in a room where someone is upset with me and stay in the room. I can be embarrassed without it turning into a story about who I am.

 

I’m still anxious sometimes. I still catch the old script running, usually when I’m tired or stressed. The difference is that I recognize it as a script now, a familiar set of thoughts built around an old belief rather than an objective description of who I am. And I know where it came from, so I don’t have to automatically believe it, defend against it, or let it decide what I do.

 

What I Know Now

 

So here is what I can actually say on a day like today. I really wasn’t defective. I was hurting. I had beliefs and patterns I couldn’t yet see, laid down before I had any say in them, and I organized forty years of my life around them. Some of the ways I dealt with the pain made more pain. None of it meant there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

 

I’d bet the same is true of you. The reactions you replay, the things you do at night that you’d never tell anyone, the list you keep, may not be evidence that the underlying beliefs are true. Those reactions have a history, and they may make more sense when you understand what they’re protecting or what you learned to believe about yourself a long time ago.

 

For me, real change started when I began to consistently recognize the old programming and got curious enough to ask, over and over again, whether it was actually true. Over time, that gave me another possibility: I could understand where the old programming came from without continuing to live by it. I could respond differently. I could build a different relationship with myself. And eventually, I could stop organizing my life around the belief that I was broken.

 

That experience is part of why I built Mindscape. I wanted to make it easier for other people to access the kinds of care and tools that helped me create space from the mental noise, understand the patterns underneath it, and build a different relationship with myself.

 

It doesn’t happen all at once. It starts with one moment, one breath. One instant where you can see the difference between a negative thought and your authentic self. You don’t have to do anything with it, or have a big epiphany. Just notice once. Then maybe notice again.

 

Eiad Asbahi is a founder and father. He spent nearly two decades managing an investment fund before a divorce sent him inward, and the next five years rebuilding his relationship with himself. He founded Mindscape to make the kind of guided, medically supervised care that changed his life easier to find and navigate.

 

To watch a video about Eiad’s journey, visit our About page.