Conor Stone, 23
#MyTherapyJourney
Conor Stone, 23
📍Dublin, Ireland
“I was forced to retire from sport with injury when I was twenty years old. Sport was everything to me. It gave me my edge, a place to release my competitiveness, my aggression and my energy in a healthy way. To lose that before I hit my peak broke me. After finishing playing, I started to feel different almost immediately - less in control of my mood and my energy. I was due to go traveling with friends soon after and I used that as my suppression tool. I thought that partying and traveling would bring me back to myself. The reality was the traveling and partying only made things worse, and I started to experience back to back days of panic and anxiety. Days became weeks, and when I got home the bad days did not stop. I had to get help.
I went to therapy when I returned from my holiday. I thought, “I’ll go for 3-4 sessions and I’ll be good as new, it was just that I was away from home and I’m missing sport.” I went in hoping for a magic cure for my anxiety and depression, but I quickly realised that doesn’t exist. Over time it became apparent that my issues were more serious than I first thought. Over-exercising had allowed me to push down my issues and losing sport was not only a grief in itself but it also meant that I wasn't able to forget anymore, I had to deal with my demons. Through therapy, I was given a platform to deal with those demons. I had all this grief in my life that I had pushed down inside of me. My therapist helped me finally release the pain of my parents separation, personal heartbreaks and being forced to retire from sport. Not only that but my therapist challenged me to reanalyse my life. My lifestyle was burning me out. I worked myself too hard. Whenever I wasn’t working or studying, I was socialising or playing sport. I left no time to check in with myself or to talk to people about issues in my life. I created an environment for myself where personal issues could be hidden behind walls of work and activities. If I didn’t have to think about issues, did they even exist? If they didn’t exist, what was there to talk about? Therapy has encouraged me to push loving myself to the top of my agenda and that has changed my world. I am now close to 100 sessions into my therapy journey. That is one hundred hours of talking about my life, one hundred hours of being challenged, 100 hours of being set free.”