I've been been virtually going to therapy for 1.5 years now, and the therapist I've been seeing is Chiara Molla. A friend of mine who did therapy for over a year with the same therapist recognized that I needed therapy, and was suggesting her to me.
If you have reluctance to go seek therapy: it makes sense. I've heard of all kind of stories from people I personally know, such as a friend of mine who was paid $300 a session at some other therapist, and no benefit came out of it. I've heard of some therapists being terrible people. And this is already on top of the fact that as men, for some reason, we just REALLY do NOT ever wanna do therapy. We would rather do anything else besides going into our worst memories / talking about feelings. I have some good news though: it's actually possible to do therapy and get benefits without even saying out loud what your worse memories are. But more on that later.
Going into how I was ignoring mental health and avoiding therapy: my mental state eventually got to the point where ignoring it was no longer an option. For seemingly no reason at all, I'd all of a sudden feel a tingling sensation on my face, which then propagated into my brain. And when that happened, I felt a wave of crippling depression that I cannot put into words. And I would have to shut down for a few minutes until the wave would pass, so I could resume acting like everything is normal at work or wherever I was at. And even then, I would just ALWAYS feel bad. I could just tell this was the result of me ignoring my mental state rather than addressing it, and so the problems were getting worse in the background, and they would never go away on their own. And so... after this started happening, I signed up for therapy starting January 2025.
The first few sessions of therapy are where your therapist is getting to know you and figure out what methods to try on you, since every single person is different, and so different therapy techniques would be needed. Eventually she concluded that EMDR, would be a technique to use on me, and after the 9th therapy session with her was the first "breakthrough" which made me start to feel a lot better. After each breakthrough, I would think that there aren't really any more breakthroughs to make, but I keep getting surprised. There have been many breakthroughs, with permanent & enormous improvements to my mental state, by resolving my worst memories from childhood.
As of May of 2026, I no longer have any of those moments of crippling depression. I am no longer feeling persistently bad in the background. When working out, I was trying to dig into some angry part of me to go push through the sets I'd have to do under the barbell, but I don't have that anger in me anymore. Instead I found some more positive thought/drive of "do it for yourself". It's hard to explain. But the point is that I honestly feel like I'm mentally healed. I'm gonna keep going to therapy to see if maybe more breakthroughs happen though.
Also, incase you have some memories that you absolutely refuse to say out loud: it's possible to do therapy on it without saying out loud what it was / is. There was a series of EMDR therapy sessions that I did where I didn't mention the actual memory at all, and Chiara was still able to guide me through healing my mind. So if that's something that is stopping you from going (it was something stopping me from going), this is simply not something you have to worry about.
Lastly, I recommend at least trying therapy before deciding to hop on something like SSRIs. I think prescription drugs like this are a temporary patch, and also have the risk of health side effects. But it doesn't address the source of the trauma / mental health issues at the core. Drugs would NOT have solved my issues at the core, but continuing to show up for therapy, even when my mind was dreading it (in fact, ESPECIALLY when my mind was dreading it) was what healed me for life. It's something more valuable than anything else I could have done for myself. read more
