Culture, Identity and Help · Article AR-002

Strong is not the same as well.

Ione Hepburn · 8 min read

On culture, identity, and why asking for help can cost more for some people than for others.

Some people come to counselling having only had to decide whether they want it.

Others have another decision to make.

What will it cost me if someone knows?

What will my family think? What will people say? Will I be seen differently at church, at work, or in my community?

Those questions are real.

Sometimes, before we can ask for help, we have to deal with what we have learned about needing it.

What gets called strength

I grew up around strong people.

They worked. They survived. They took care of what needed to be taken care of. There was not always time, money, or even the language to talk about how you felt.

There is strength in that.

But I learned something else about strength.

You can keep going and still not be well.

You can go to work. Take care of your children. Answer the telephone. Show up when somebody needs you. Laugh when something is funny.

And still be struggling.

Sometimes sadness gets called tiredness. Fear gets called stress.

Not sleeping becomes, “That is just how I am.”

And because you are still functioning, people call you strong.

Maybe you are.

But strong is not the same as well.

What happens in this house

Some families are private. There is nothing wrong with that.

But there is a difference between privacy and feeling that you are not allowed to speak about your own life.

I understand that difference.

Much of my story happened within relationships with people I loved, depended on, or was connected to. Even when I eventually wrote my memoir, I changed names and identifying details because although the experiences were mine, they involved other people too.

For some people, talking to a counsellor about family feels disloyal.

You can love someone and still have been hurt by them.

You can understand why someone behaved as they did and still talk about what their behaviour did to you.

Those things can exist together.

Counselling is not supposed to require you to choose between loving your family and telling the truth about your own experience.

Faith, and what it is being asked to carry

Faith has had different places in my life.

I grew up around Christianity. There were periods when I believed. There were periods when I was angry with God. There were also periods when I questioned whether God existed at all.

So I do not assume what faith means to another person.

For some people, it is central to how they understand themselves and how they have survived difficult periods. For others, it is complicated. Some have another faith, and some have none.

All of that belongs to the person sitting in the room.

I remember a difficult period in my own life when I sat in my car crying and told my aunt I had no fight left.

She prayed.

At the time, I was not sure what I believed about God. But I knew what I believed about my aunt.

She loved me.

She stayed on the telephone. She listened. She encouraged me. And eventually I was able to think about what I needed to do next.

Her faith did not have to become mine for her support to matter.

Today, as a counsellor, I believe faith should be treated with the same respect as the other things a client tells me are important to them.

It does not need to be defended.

It does not need to be left outside the room.

And it should not be assumed.

Being the one everybody relies on

Some people become the person everybody calls.

After a while, being needed can become part of how other people know you.

It can also become part of how you know yourself.

Then something happens when you are the one who needs help.

It can feel uncomfortable.

Sometimes even embarrassing.

I know something about that too.

There have been periods in my life when other people thought I was doing well while I knew something very different was happening inside me.

I have also had periods when I could not have managed everything alone.

Friends helped me.

Family helped me.

Professionals helped me.

Accepting that was something I had to learn.

The room itself

Then there is the counselling room.

Sometimes the concern is simple.

Those are fair concerns.

I have been the client in the room.

Now I am also the counsellor in it.

I do not believe a counsellor has to share your race, nationality, religion, accent, or history to be helpful to you. If that were the requirement, many of us would have very few people to choose from.

But a counsellor should be able to hear, “That is not what this means where I come from,” without becoming defensive.

They should be willing to learn something they do not know.

And you should be able to ask questions too.

You are not interviewing someone to see whether they know everything about you.

They will not.

You are finding out what they do when they don’t.

What I have carried

I attempted suicide when I was sixteen.

Afterwards, I had some counselling. I was not very receptive to it. I also did not feel particularly understood.

I went home and continued with my life.

For years, that looked like moving forward.

I graduated. I went to college. I got married. I became a mother. I worked. I built a life.

Almost fourteen years after my suicide attempt, I found myself struggling again.

This time I knew something was wrong.

I remember telling a friend, “I know I don’t want to die, but when the sadness comes, it makes me feel like I do.”

Eventually, I saw a psychiatrist.

She believed I was experiencing major depressive disorder and recommended therapy and medication.

I did not want the medication.

Part of my resistance was fear. But there was something else underneath it.

I was embarrassed.

I remember thinking, How had I let this happen to me, an educated person? I’m not one of those people.

I had spent enough of my life concerned about how other people might see mental illness without noticing what I believed about it myself.

Apparently, I had created a group called “those people.”

And apparently, I thought I was too educated to belong to it.

That was uncomfortable to discover about myself.

Eventually, I accepted treatment.

Friends helped pay for some of my sessions. One helped me with the medication. My psychiatrist challenged some of the ways I had learned to think about myself and the things that had happened to me.

I did not get better because I finally became strong enough to do everything myself.

I had already tried that.

I accepted help.

That experience affects the way I think about counselling now.

I know what it is like to sit on the other side of the room.

I know what it is like not to trust the process.

I know what it is like to worry about what accepting help says about you.

And I know that being educated, capable, responsible, or the person other people depend on does not make you exempt from having a difficult time.

It did not make me exempt.

If you are weighing it up

You may have reasons for being unsure about counselling.

Maybe those reasons come from your family.

Maybe from your faith or culture.

Maybe you had a bad experience with counselling before.

Maybe you are concerned that the counsellor will not understand where you come from.

Or maybe you simply do not like the idea of telling a stranger your business.

You do not have to pretend those concerns are not there.

Ask questions.

Pay attention to how the answers sit with you.

You can bring your faith into the conversation if it matters to you.

You can care about your family’s privacy and still talk about your own life.

You can be the person everybody depends on and admit that there are times when you need somebody too.

I used to think strength was measured by how much I could carry.

I don’t anymore.

Strong is not the same as well.

About the author

Ione Hepburn, MA, LPCC, NCC, CLC, C-MI, is a Licensed Professional Clinical Mental Health Counselor licensed in the State of New Mexico, a National Certified Counselor, Certified Life Coach, Certified Meditation Instructor, and author of Lessons from a Friend. She works from Gestalt, mindfulness, motivational interviewing, person-centred and Gottman Method approaches.

Based in Nassau, The Bahamas, she works with individuals and couples, online in New Mexico and throughout The Bahamas, and in person in Nassau. Her writing draws on her own lived experience as much as her clinical training.