Several moons ago, I was desperate for help. I felt extremely overwhelmed by life and was not doing well. I had a toddler to take care of, my spouse was rarely at home due to his job, I had my full-time job, and we lived in a city where we had no family to help out. (We still live in that same city where we have no family.) I stopped going to therapy when my daughter was born because I no longer had time to make the 45-minute drive each way to see my therapist. When I would do that before, I just worked later into the evening to make up for lost time. My husband was at work anyway, so why not just work way too many hours?* Once I had a baby, that wasn’t feasible.

But anyway… I was drowning and knew that I needed some kind of help. I had used my employer’s EAP in the past and that was a joke.** So I succumbed to the new lure of trying online therapy.

If you listen to any podcast or watch any YouTube video these days, you’ll likely find they are sponsored by BetterHelp. But this was before BetterHelp was being shoved down our throats at every turn and it was still in its infancy, around 2013. They were still a new kid on the scene and online therapy was still very niche/strange/different/new.

So I signed up with BetterHelp. I answered some questions and waited eagerly to be matched with a therapist. I’ve never tried online dating, I got married way before that was a thing. But I’m curious if the little gurgle of excitement that I had as I sent off my answers and waited is the same one might feel with dating apps. I was optimistic that someone would be able to listen to me and help me.

Once the “match” came, I scheduled a call with the therapist I was matched with. It was a super uncomfortable and awkward conversation. The therapist started off asking a few questions about my history and when she heard that I had moved to Nevada from Utah, she jumped all over that. She immediately started talking about how terrible organized religion was for people and how it destroys their mental health and she knows so many people from that predominant faith in Utah and how it makes them just plain weird. I couldn’t get a word in. I think I said “um” and “uh” a few times as she kept going on and on for the majority of our time.

Then she wrapped it up and said we were at the end of our time, that was a good talk, and she looked forward to our next session. She disconnected the call and I was left sitting there wondering what just happened.

Religion wasn’t even what I wanted to talk about. I wanted someone to comfort me and listen to me express how broken I felt. I needed someone to confirm that it is completely normal to feel as if I’m split into two now that I have a child. To talk about how I overall feel dumber all the time because my brain is now divided with low-grade buzzing about my child’s well-being all the time while the rest of my brain is trying to accomplish everything else in life. I needed reassurance that I wasn’t alone in this.

Looking at my husband, he definitely didn’t seem to be fractured at all now that he was a parent. In fact, he would put his wallet and phone in the back seat of the car if he had to drive the baby anywhere so he wouldn’t forget the baby… Let that one settle in. He knew with certainty he would not forget the phone or the wallet, but he might forget the living being we created. That blew my mind and then I had anger simmering in my brain all the time that he could be so carefree still and also that he could just keep living his life. He just kept waking up for work when he wanted to for his schedule, he could work late if he felt the need. My life had experienced a seismic shift and it seemed like his life took a step to the side but was still on track.

I didn’t ever call back into BetterHelp. That weird conversation just really irked me and I knew I didn’t need to waste more money on repeat one-sided diatribes like that. So I canceled. They offered to find me a new therapist but I had already soured on that.

And I still feel like my brain is broken. My child is literally my heart, my brain, my soul just detached from me and walking around in the world. I’m not sure I was cut out to be a parent. Except that, I love that kid more than anyone else, so perhaps that is why people have continued to have children. (It didn’t work for me to try to have another though.)

But in a random turn of events the other day I got money deposited into my PayPal account from a settlement in a lawsuit between the FTC and BetterHelp. Roughly a decade after that initial experience I get to be part of the payout. There should probably be more lawsuits because they still advertise an annoyingly often amount on a wide range of podcasts/videos and clearly have an excessively large advertising budget to sucker more people in.

I got a whopping $9.72 back from that case. I’m probably going to blow it all in one place, like groceries. Not on therapy, because therapy is expensive and $10 isn’t going to cover much of the cost of a visit. That hour with BetterHelp can’t be given back and I’m pretty sure my time is worth more than $10/hour in this economy. ***

So there’s my BetterHelp story that was actually NoHelp.

* Here’s the reason why you shouldn’t work around the clock. Your colleagues start to have unrealistic expectations about how much work you can get done in a day. And then when you are no longer able to keep up with that frequency, they start to bug you with requests “I sent this to you 2 hours ago and it’s not done yet!” And then as your department expands and the workload continues to increase, you will have probably stunted the growth that should have happened earlier because you spent YEARS working around the clock.

** I sure hope the EAP is better now because I am struggling still and I may have to revisit that. There is just too much stress now, between the workload of my job that just keeps building, and the uncertainty surrounding my husband’s job, and still that whole parenting thing. The jerks that told me “little kids, little problems” when she was tiny are right… the problems do just get bigger. But nobody needs to tell anyone struggling in the heat of the moment with little kid problems because those are tough at that time. That said, I would love to return to having the biggest issue of the week be “What solid food should we introduce next?”

*** Did you know that my first DEGREE-REQUIRING job after college paid me $10/hour? Guess my time back then was not worth more than $10/hour.