03. "Mindfulness starts with me" - Simon Rinne
My name is Simon Rinne, and I’m a husband, dad and social worker with a private therapy practice called Mindful Men. To understand how I came to running my own therapy business at 39, you need to understand my life from about 8 years old.
I grew up during the 80s and 90s in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. If you haven’t been there, think working class mixed with welfare. This is the place where Holdens were built until 2017, the Snowtown murders infiltrated suburban Adelaide, and Jimmy Barnes grew up. The infamous David Hicks was even from this part of town.
During the 80s and 90s, there was no such thing as smart phones, social media or broadband internet. So my understanding of how to be a man was informed by those around me, or the limited choices we had on TV and radio. I was one of four boys in our household, and dad made it five blokes (sorry mum!). We were sports mad, and if we weren’t playing or watching Aussie Rules Footy, we were at athletics, playing basketball or enjoying endless hours of backyard cricket.
To be a man in this environment was to be tough. Men never cried or showed emotions, and so boys were conditioned to do the same. If I ever fell over or was sad about something; I’d usually get the “suck it up” or “don’t be a wuss” response from my dad, brothers, mates or sports coaches. This was the norm, and over the years I learned to bottle things up through fear of being ridiculed and labelled as someone who was anything but a man.
Up until eight years old, I was a pretty resilient kid. Mum always said I was “happy go lucky” and “carefree”, which made me feel good. But all this changed when some kid in the schoolyard said that if I didn’t speak for a minute, I would lose my voice forever. Now most people would laugh that off, but it stuck with me for the next year and half. And to ensure that didn’t happen, I started humming to myself… all day, every day.
Enter Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD. OCD is an obsessive thought that triggers huge anxiety, and to alleviate that anxiety you perform a compulsion (or behaviour). To be diagnosed with OCD, you need to be performing these “acts” for more than an hour each day. So for me, the obsession was the thought and fear that I would lose my voice if I didn’t talk; and the compulsion was me humming to myself to check that my voice was still there. Talk about ridiculous, but then again OCD is quite absurd when you write down or speak about the types of obsessions we have and compulsions we do.
In my teens I developed generalised anxiety and depression. The mix of these plus OCD fuelled an internal battle that I was having with myself. It felt like I was wearing a mask to hide the real me. On the outside, I was like any other boy in school; with periods of popularity linked to my sports-field feats. But on the inside, I was a shell of a person. I was terrified of other people, constantly anxious, performing endless compulsions to address my obsessions, and was downright depressed. But I didn’t know these feelings were reflective of mental illness, because that ability to reflect on emotions had been conditioned out of me.
Over the years, alcohol became a safety net. At first it was a rite of passage; you turn 16 and start drinking to show you’re becoming a man. But as time went on, I found I was using it to numb the pain, slow the racing thoughts and even be social. I had gone from that happy go lucky kid, to someone who could barely look another person in the eye. So I drank, and I drank regularly. For the next 20 or so years, drinking became a norm in my life, like it is for so many Australians where we have a big drinking culture. And whilst it helped, it also hindered. I stayed depressed, anxious and constantly checking… and that temporary band aid would just fall off the next morning.
It wasn’t until I met my now wife that I realised things needed to change. To quote Tony Robbins, it got to a point where “the pain of staying the same was greater than the pain of change”. After years of avoiding mental health discussions, it was my now wife who encouraged me to go and speak with my GP. Why? Because she recognised my behaviour, including my drinking, and believed that I could do better. She had faith in me that the glimpses of happy go lucky Simon were still in there, buried between anxious thoughts, up and down moods, and compulsive checking behaviours.
In 2012, I drummed up the courage to go to that GP and utter the words “I think I have mental health issues”. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say as it was going against everything that I had been taught growing up. Here I was, revealing my weakness like no bloke apparently should. But you know what happened? It felt good! And it felt even better after the GP referred me to a psychologist, and I started going to therapy.
It was here that I learned I had been living with OCD, depression and anxiety for most of my life. A lot of people say they aren’t defined by their diagnoses, but in a way, I think I am. Not only did it help me understand what I had been wrestling with since I was eight, it also helped me realise that help was out there; and even better – that psychologists had heard my story before. I suddenly felt less alone in the world, and was ready to start my recovery journey.
This year is 10 years since this moment, and my journey continues. I have seen psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and social workers; and tried different therapies and medications. I have been on multiple mental health care plans, and now managing and talking about my mental health is as normal for me as it is my physical health.
As tough as my mental health journey has been, what I appreciate about it is how my diagnoses and subsequent treatment has helped me grow. Yes, I still experience OCD, anxiety and depression, but I know where to get help when things get bad. Yes, I still drink beer, but these days I recognise that if I’m drinking too much; that maybe there is something I need to tweak in my life to address the stressors that are spiking my OCD, depression or anxiety. I also recognise that it’s not a form of medication, and that some dry time is a really good thing.
One of the things that have struck a chord with me is mindfulness. It’s something I have found through my own therapy that really works to clear the mind, ground ourselves in the moment and sit through troubling periods. Mindfulness particularly helped me recover from burnout in 2020, where I was working full time, studying at university part time, having two kids under 5 and dealing with COVID… all at once. I was spent physically, mentally and emotionally, but mindfulness helped bring back the joy in my life.
I loved it so much that I use it as a foundation for my therapy work in Mindful Men. I founded Mindful Men after I finished university, to provide a dedicated mental health service for blokes just like me. When you Google men’s mental health, not much in terms of dedicated support services comes up. There’s plenty of specialist services for kids and women, but not so much for men.
At Mindful Men I help blokes to open up by challenging these social constructs that we’ve all been conditioned with for decades. I draw on mindfulness to calm the mind, and help my clients reconnect with that happy go lucky self that they once knew. Here we explore our values, our purpose and drive; and use these to commit to a mindful way of living. And it’s not just being mindful of our mental health, but also other areas of our life like our physical health, finances, relationships, identity, careers, social circles and interests.
When I look back on my journey, one thing sticks out: that it’s not weak to speak. Boys and men can cry, and they actually should.
By talking, you can become mindful of ways to feel better, live better, and just be better. So what are you waiting for? Help is just a call away.