I Thought I Should Be Able to Handle This Myself
By Dr. John S. Tamerin · 5 min read · August 12, 2026
The stories in my writing are drawn from over fifty years of practice. Names, details, and circumstances have been changed. No real patient is identifiable.
You have handled worse than this.
You got yourself through a period nobody knew about. You have run things, carried people, made decisions on your own that other men would have needed a committee for. Nobody had to come and get you.
So the fact that you are sitting there reading a psychiatrist’s website is faintly humiliating, and you have closed the tab twice already.
I am not going to argue with the self-reliance
It works. That is the part most of my profession gets wrong about men like you.
You are not in denial and you are not repressed. You have a genuine, tested skill, which is the ability to take something heavy and carry it without setting it down in front of anyone. It has solved almost every problem you have ever had. There is no reason on earth you would abandon a method with that record.
A man told me once that before he came in, he believed he had to handle his difficulties alone, and if he could not handle them then he would simply learn to live with them.
Notice that there is no third option in that sentence. Solve it, or live with it forever. That is the whole map.
The one thing it cannot do
Self-reliance is a method for problems that respond to effort. Most problems do. That is why the method has such a good record.
It has one blind spot, and it is not a small one. It cannot solve a problem that is generated by how you are seeing the thing in the first place.
You cannot out-effort a bad angle. If the way you are reading the situation is producing the difficulty, then working harder inside that reading makes it worse in direct proportion to how hard you work. And the harder you are working, the more certain you are that you are on the right lines, because effort feels like progress.
That is geometry. It has nothing to do with character. You cannot see your own blind spot by concentrating harder on it.
Every man I have treated who insisted on carrying it alone was, without exception, carrying something he had never once described out loud. The weight was never the difficulty. The silence was.
What a second man in the room is actually for
Not for sympathy. You have not run short of sympathy and you would not spend the money on it.
He is for the angle. He is there because he is outside the thing and can see the shape of it, and because he has seen several thousand versions of it before and yours is not as novel as it feels at two in the morning.
I have written before that the most useful coaching I ever received was a tennis professional telling me my racket was late. He was standing where he could see something I could not see from inside the swing. There was nothing wise about it.
That is the entire proposition. It is a second vantage point, and nothing more mysterious than that.
The trait that kept you out is usually part of the story
I want to put this carefully, because it is easily turned into an insult and I do not intend one.
The determination to manage everything alone is real and it has served you. It has also, in most of the men I have treated, been quietly involved in whatever finally went wrong. The drinking that nobody was told about. The marriage where nothing was said for eleven years because saying it would have been asking for something. The work that expanded until it filled the space where a life used to be.
None of that comes from weakness. It comes from a strength applied to a situation it was never built for.
The man I mentioned earlier has been sober a year now. He did not get there by becoming a different sort of person. He kept the trait. He just stopped using it on the one problem it could not touch.
What the first session looks like
You will do a good deal less confessing than you are braced for.
I will ask a lot of questions and most of them will be practical. What you actually do in a day. What you have already tried. What you are good at. I want to know how you solve things, because whatever we do next will be built out of that rather than in spite of it.
You will not be asked to describe your feelings in a vocabulary you do not use. If tennis or business or a machine is how you think, we will use tennis or business or a machine.
And I will tell you what I think. Directly, when I have something worth saying and have worked out how to put it. That is the part men in your position usually turn out to want and cannot say they want in advance.
An Invitation
You do not have to arrive believing in any of this. The man I have been quoting arrived believing in none of it, and said his skepticism went in the first meeting.
Come once. Treat it as a consultation, which is what it is. You are permitted to conclude that it is not for you, and if I think you are fine I will say so and you can have your evening back.
