This week I worked with someone who knows more about mental health than most people ever will.
Years of training. A demanding, high-responsibility role. A career built on supporting others through some of the hardest moments of their lives.
And yet there they were, sitting with me, trying to unpick why they’d been struggling quietly, privately, for longer than they’d admitted to anyone.
Knowing about something and living with it are two very different things.
That’s not a failure. It’s not a gap in their knowledge or a weakness in their character. It’s one of the most human things there is.
The people who help others are often the last to ask for help
I see this pattern regularly. Doctors, nurses, teachers, managers, carers — people who have spent their professional lives holding space for others often find it hardest to claim that space for themselves.
There’s an unspoken pressure that comes with expertise. A sense that you should be able to manage this. That reaching out would somehow undermine everything you’ve built or everything you know.
But here’s what I’ve learned in over 25 years of working with people: understanding the theory of something doesn’t protect you from experiencing it. A cardiologist can still have a heart attack. A psychologist can still struggle with their mental health.
What actually helps
What we did together what we always do was start from the beginning. Not from what they knew, but from what they were actually experiencing.
We unpicked why they were doing what they were doing. We looked at what was working, what wasn’t, and why. We talked about their neurodiversity what it means for how they work, how they think, how they relate to the people around them and began building strategies that fit their life, not a textbook version of it.
Things started shifted. Not because I told them anything they didn’t already know on some level. But because have space to be vulnerable and listened to without judgement and adding a different perspective and impartially is different from knowing things in your head.
Change often begins when someone helps you see things differently.
This might be you
If you’re reading this and recognising something if you’ve been telling yourself you should be fine by now, that you know enough to sort it out on your own, that other people have it worse I want to say this clearly:
Those thoughts are very common. And they are not a reason to keep going without support.
It doesn’t matter how much you know. It doesn’t matter what your job title is. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve supported a hundred other people through exactly this.
You’re allowed to need support too.
Did something in this resonate?
Whether it's for you personally or for the people you lead, the first conversation is always free.
07981 508023 | enquiries@andreapeers.com