How Laura Linney Helped Courtney B. Vance After His Dad Died by Suicide: ‘She Changed My Life’ (Exclusive)

In his new book ‘The Invisible Ache,’ Courtney B. Vance recalls the support of theater costars Laura Linney and Stockard Channing

Courtney B. Vance is revealing how supportive Laura Linney is as a friend.

The Emmy-winning People v. O.J. Simpson star, 63, discusses in this week’s issue of PEOPLE the details of his father’s sudden suicide in 1990. Starring in Six Degrees of Separation on Broadway at the time, Vance leaned on his New York theater community amid his grief.

“Laura Linney, God bless her, she changed my life,” he remembers. “I came back from taking care of my mom, getting her affairs in order… and the whole company embraced me.” That included Linney, 59, then an understudy on the Vivian Beaumont Theater-set production.

“She said, ‘Courtney, I know this young lady, somebody I think you’d really like.’” Linney recommended that Vance see massage therapist Gunilla Asp, he recalls. It was Asp who then introduced him to Margaret Kornfeld, the therapist who would help Vance through the painful process of healing over decades.

“If you don’t take steps, if you don’t begin the work to wholeness, you’ll never come into your fullness,” says Vance, who with psychologist Dr. Robin L. Smith has written a new guidebook to healing, The Invisible Ache: Black Men Identifying Their Pain and Reclaiming Their Power.

Of his father Conroy’s suicide, Vance writes in the book: “There’s no map for where your thoughts go in a moment like that, when you learn someone you can’t imagine life without is now gone, not because he was snatched away by sickness or old age, but because he’d chosen to leave us, by his own hand.”

The book also reveals that Vance’s first call upon hearing the tragic news was to his Six Degrees costar Stockard Channing. Despite their vow never to skip performances, she immediately instructed Vance to go home to Detroit and mourn with his family.

It was after that trip home that his mother Leslie instructed him to seek professional therapy.

“Thank God I got the mandate from her,” he tells PEOPLE. Finding the right therapist, he admits, is “fraught with so many reasons to say, ‘Ah, it’s too much work.’ When you’re on the outside of it, looking in, it’s overwhelming. It’s too much work for the potential payoff.”

But, he continues, “the payoff is you.” Vance’s ongoing commitment to healing, as hard as that commitment can be, is what gives him hope. As he writes in the book: “Thankfully I had a mother who encouraged me to seek counseling, and I had people like Laura Linney and the masseuse, Gunilla, who led me to Dr. K.”

Vance is grateful for those communities that have provided him emotional support when he most needed it. With The Invisible Ache, he hopes others can begin the process of owning and sharing their pain — especially to reverse what the book categorizes as “the epidemic of suicide among our young Black men.”

“You’ve got to start somewhere” in reclaiming mental health, says Vance. “You have wherever you are. And where you are means starting with, ‘I’m lost,’ starting with, ‘I’m hurting.’

“If we can get one person from the brink to say, ‘If he can, where he was, begin to do the work, to take the steps, then maybe I can. Let me reach out like he reached out and find a Laura Linney.’

“I keep on lifting up my girl, Laura Linney,” he adds with a laugh. “I love my girl!”

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

source: people.com