Erik Darose - Suffering in Silence: What Anxiety, OCD, and COVID Taught One Mental Health Advocate About the Healing He Was Avoiding

Erik Darose is a mental health advocate, speaker, and founder and host of the From Survivor to Thriver podcast.Most men who struggle with anxiety and OCD don't talk about it for decades. They push it down, function at a high level, and convince themselves they're managing. Erik did exactly that — for 26 years. He worked on Wall Street, built a life, and kept his mental health a complete secret until a dissociative episode forced everything into the open. But here's the thing: even after that, even after therapy and medication and real work, COVID arrived and revealed that he had only ever been treating the symptoms. The root had never been touched.Expect to learn why men are specifically conditioned to see vulnerability as weakness and how that conditioning becomes its own form of trauma, what it actually felt like to live with undiagnosed OCD and severe anxiety for three decades, how COVID created a mental health crisis for people who thought they had already done the work, why treating symptoms and doing genuine healing are two completely different things, what PTSD from childhood trauma looks like when it finally surfaces in adulthood, how combining Eastern and Western treatment modalities changed Erik's recovery in ways therapy alone never could, why vulnerability is not just a personal value but the first and most essential step on any healing journey, what it means to go back and heal the younger version of yourself, and much more.This conversation will challenge the idea that you've dealt with something just because you've learned to live with it.