This is a guest post by C.B. Huckabee. He is a writer for Man’s World Magazine, a special programs veteran, and a current counseling psychology graduate student exploring personality, sex differences, and masculinity. Most importantly, he is the father to two sons and has a vested interest in rebalancing society for their sake. Check out his Substack and find him on X.
The very first time that my hat flooded with water, I was at around a hundred feet. I was a new diver and was wearing a KM-37 (a fiberglass helmet painted yum-yum yellow with the words U.S. NAVY written across it) that was filling up fast. Despite my rising panic, I managed to do what they had taught me, crack a valve called the steady-flow and tilt my head down and to the right. A torrent of air ripped into my helmet to do battle with the inflooding water, making a sound that made me feel as if my head had been stuffed inside one of those Dyson hand dryers that drip in the corners of airport bathrooms.
I tried to talk to topside, but the combination of the screaming air and the seawater covering my nose and mouth rendered any attempt at words unintelligible. I shoved frantically at the flap of neoprene that had inverted at the back of my neck, which was still bubbling with incoming water. Then, the bubbling stopped. With my last bit of air, I blew hard, hoping to clear enough of the water that I could breathe, and—when I finally stood up on the bottom of the sea floor—I took a ragged breath. When the rest of the water was purged from my helmet, I secured the steady-flow and sat down on the sandy ground, grateful to be alive.
When one of my graduate professors asked the class if anyone had any close calls that had stuck with them, I raised my hand and told that story. The responses from my classmates, however compassionate, confused me. People told me that they were sorry I had to go through that and “Wow, that must have been traumatic”—but it wasn’t traumatic at all. It was badass. Sure, it was intense and damned stressful. It was one of a handful of times in my life when I was almost certain I wasn’t going to make it out of a situation, but it wasn’t trauma.
This was perhaps the first time that I realized the extent to which I wasn’t a natural fit for the field of psychotherapy. Since then, I’ve further realized just how soft-headed fields like psychology, psychotherapy, and education have become as a result of an overly soft-hearted approach to life. I began to believe that—concerning the ever-increasing psychological frailty, mental illness, and dependent adults in our culture—we may have stumbled into an industry equivalent of the old horror trope of a call coming from inside the house. It’s never a good thing when any institution becomes temperamentally imbalanced—but this is especially true concerning the fields that define what is and isn’t mental wellness, normative psychological development, and human nature itself.
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