Chelsea Handler thought she was too "smart" to need therapy.
The 44-year-old star consulted Dr. Dan Siegel – who had previously appeared on her Netflix series ‘Chelsea’ – after becoming enraged by the 2016 presidential election and the psychiatrist made her realise that the way the vote made her feel the world had become "unhinged" tok her back to when her beloved eldest brother, Chet, died while hiking in 1984.
She said: "I thought I could go through life without ever having gone to therapy.
"Like, I’m tougher than that, I’m smarter than that. I don’t have to visit my childhood stuff.
"It turned out, the election represented to me the world being unhinged, which was exactly what happened to me when my brother died when I was nine years old.
"He told me he’d come back, and he said he’d never leave me with these people, referring to my parents, … and he was just going hiking and that I would always have him, and he never came back."
Through her sessions with Dan, Chelsea realised she had never fully processed her brother’s death or understood how much it had impacted on her as she’d got older, leading her to writing her memoir ‘Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and you too!’ in the hope she can help others.
She told USA Today newspaper: "I started coming home and writing down the stuff that Dan, my doctor, was telling me about [how] I was emotionally attached to this nine-year-old girl and that was the reason I had become the way I’d become.
"Because I’m so resilient and I want to be so strong and I wrote it because I thought, ‘Wow if I’m going through this, then how many other haven’t dealt with their pain?’ "
Chelsea recalled how "broken" her family felt after Chet, the eldest of six children, passed away and admitted her own way of dealing with his death was to simply leave the room whenever he was mentioned.
She said: "I didn’t like seeing my father weak. I’d already lost my brother; I couldn’t lose my dad too, and I did. My dad never recovered.
I dealt with it by just, if anybody talked about Chet or mentioned him, I’d just leave the room. I’d get on my bike, and I’d ride my bike for hours around the neighbourhood. I could cry on my bike, but I wouldn’t let anyone see me cry in person."
Chelsea Handler didn’t think she needed therapy
