Mental Health Healing
By Wayne “Big Sarge” Ince | BreakingRanksBlog This post explores the importance of mental health therapy for individuals seeking support and healing.
There is a specific kind of morning I know well. You are up before the house stirs. Coffee. The news. The same knot in your chest that was there when you went to bed. Your wife mentioned again last week that you seem distant. Your kids have stopped telling you things. You tell yourself you are fine. You tell yourself this is just what adulthood feels like. You pour a second cup and go back to not talking about it.
That morning has a name. We just don’t use it.
I am a 23-year Air Force veteran. I have been deployed to four combat theaters and come home from all of them. I know what it is to be trained to absorb damage and say nothing. I also know what happened when I finally stopped. I walked into a therapist’s office because I needed to figure it out, and the first thing I thought was: this is not for men like me.
That thought is exactly what I want to talk about.
The explanation you have already heard is wrong
People say Black men don’t go to therapy because of stigma. Because of pride. Because of the “strong Black man” image that gets handed down like a piece of furniture nobody asked for but everybody keeps.
That framing is not wrong. It is incomplete.
Stigma does not fully explain a man who has watched a close friend spiral for three years and done nothing except check on him by text. It does not explain a man who will see a doctor about his knee without a second thought and will not make one call about the thing waking him up at 2 a.m.
I know that man. I was him.
“The hardest words I ever said weren’t in military service or combat. They were sitting across from my loved one, telling her I wasn’t okay and speaking to a psychologist. I’d led combat comm teams through war zones, but I couldn’t lead myself out of my head. Saying it out loud fixed nothing instantly, but it stopped me from carrying it alone. That was the beginning.”
— The Unseen March, Chapter 3
The fuller picture has three parts. None of them have anything to do with weakness.
Part one: we do not trust the institution
This is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.
The American medical system has a documented history with Black bodies. The Tuskegee syphilis study ran from 1932 to 1972 — forty years of deliberate non-treatment on Black men while the government watched what happened. Henrietta Lacks died in 1951. Her cells were taken without consent and used commercially for decades while her family knew nothing and received nothing. A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that nearly half of medical students and residents held false beliefs about Black patients’ pain tolerance and adjusted their treatment recommendations accordingly.
Mental health care sits inside that same institution. A Black man sitting across from a therapist for the first time is not being irrational when he wonders whose interests are being served.
I went through the VA system. I know what it costs to trust it.
“The VA system almost broke me before I even got into treatment. I enrolled in VA healthcare, but my first mental health appointment was three months out… My first attempt to file a disability claim was unsuccessful. According to the examiner, my symptoms were not severe enough. My temper flared. However, I collaborated with a VSO, collected additional evidence such as buddy statements from my former comrades and letters from my doctors, and then filed an appeal. The VA granted my improved rating seven months later. Here’s what I learned: the system is broken in a lot of ways, but there are people inside it who genuinely want to help. You have to be persistent. You have to advocate for yourself. And you have to know your rights. Don’t let bureaucracy kill you. Fight for the care you’ve earned.”
— The Unseen March, Chapter 16
That knowledge cost me months of fighting. It is in the book so you do not have to figure it out alone.
Part two: the therapist does not look like us
As of 2022, approximately 4% of licensed psychologists in the United States are Black. Keep in mind at this time, we were navigating a new normal after COVID.
When a Black man walks into a therapy office and faces someone who has never lived inside the specific weight of being Black in America, not as an academic concept but as a Tuesday, something closes down before the session starts. Not always. But often enough to matter.
Cultural competence is not a substitute for shared experience. It is a floor, not a ceiling.
Part three: we do not know what therapy actually is
Many Black men, myself included before I knew better, picture therapy as lying on a couch and crying to a stranger about your mother. That image alone is enough to close the door before it opens.
Here is what the book says plainly, because plain is what this deserves:
“Therapy helps you process the trauma — move the memory from ‘present threat’ to ‘past event.’ It challenges distorted beliefs. It reduces avoidance. It teaches you how to live with your history without being controlled by it.”
— The Unseen March, Chapter 8
That is the clinical version. Here is mine:
“I resisted therapy for years. I thought it was for people weaker than me. When I finally went, my first therapist was nice but didn’t specialize in PTSD. We talked about my childhood for six months. It helped a little, but my nightmares didn’t change. Then I found a CPT-trained therapist through the VA. The first session, she said, ‘We’re going to talk about Bosnia. We’re going to talk about Kosovo and what happened in Haiti. And it’s going to be hard, but we’ll do it together.’
— The Unseen March, Chapter 8
That is not weakness. That is work. And the map for finding a CPT-trained therapist — through the VA, through Psychology Today’s directory, through EMDRIA — is in the book. Because that information is not always where it should be. Not for men like us.
What keeps the door closed
I am not going to tell you that therapy fixes everything. I do not believe in those arcs, and anyone selling that version is not describing recovery — they are describing a product.
What I will say is this: the knot in your chest has a source. It is not just adulthood. It is not just stress. It is years of data your body is still carrying because nobody taught you how to set it down, and you were trained to call that carrying strength.
The question is not whether you need help. The question is whether you are willing to find out what help looks like when it was not built with you in mind, but when it works anyway.
The morning I described at the top of this piece was mine. The wife noticing. The kids going quiet. The second cup of coffee and the performance of fine.
I went to therapy. Not because I had it figured out. Because I was tired of carrying the same weight every morning and calling it strength.
You don’t have to call it anything. You just have to make the call.
If you are ready to keep going, my guide on healing and breaking the stigma around Black mental health lays out the resources and the next steps in one place.
I wrote about navigating the mental health system — the VA, therapist selection, evidence-based treatments, and what to do when the system fails you — in The Unseen March. Mental health in the African American community is the subject of Until the Well Runs Dry. Both are available on Amazon.com. Not as prescriptions. As the road map I didn’t have.
Wayne Ince is a retired U.S. Air Force Senior Master Sergeant, PTSD survivor, and the author of Until the Well Runs Dry and The Unseen March: A Practical Guide to Managing PTSD for Veterans, First Responders, and Trauma Survivors. Both are available on Amazon.com. He writes at BreakingRanksBlog and publishes under Breaking Ranks Books.