I'm going to devote my 1,000th review to a guy who gets a lot of the credit for getting me here…read more
Beginning with something we men rarely ever admit: we need help. We need a lot of help, the lot of us. We need help admitting when we're wrong, and taking credit when we're right. We could do a whole lot better with friendships, with other guys, being honest, speaking up, bleeding a little, opening our hard, heavy hearts. Yeah, we could do a lot more of that, and we could do it for our spouses and our kids and our parents, if we're lucky enough to have dads who know how to listen. We're a really messy subspecies, we've been raised to shoulder it, carry it and bury it, and that stuff really ends up making a mess of the world, particularly when we try to govern it.
I found Bill when I really, really needed to open up, and I didn't know who to talk to. He's an Old Soul, you know how people say that? He is. He's probably on his fourth or fifth ride through this life, the kind of shrink you see in movies, the ones that don't actually exist. I say this because he really has worked with the gamut: suicidal veterans, violent parents, the worst behavioral and substance addicts, horribly traumatized teenagers. And that's how he connects with you, he tells his stories, and they're good, the stories either brighten the room or Thud with a resonance or universal theme that reminds you, hey, everybody hurts. Keep working, keep digging.
He got me to open up with EDMR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a methodology that felt particularly in tune with my personal processing speed -- I'm someone who isn't interested in wandering the edges, I want to get at the source, quick. I saw Bill for the better part of five months. When we began, he said to me "When we're done, we're going to know that we're done, and that's when we'll stop." My last session, I looked up at him and said, "I think we're done, Bill," and he nodded, shook my hand and said goodbye. If you're reading this review and you're a guy who could use someone to talk to, or you know a guy who could use some help, please, call Bill Jacobs. He doesn't mess around, and he's making the world just a teeny bit better everyday.