Kelly Ripa Says She Started Therapy at Age 40 After Bumping into a Friend and ‘I Just Started Sobbing’

The ‘Live with Kelly and Mark’ host talked about when she first tried therapy on her ‘Let’s Talk Off Camera’ podcast with guest Tyler Perry, who shared the therapeutic tip from pal Oprah Winfrey that changed his life

Kelly Ripa has never shied away from talking about her mental health — and on the Thursday episode of her podcast, Let’s Talk Off Camera, she shared the exact moment she decided to seek therapy.

“I went into therapy when I turned 40,” Ripa, now 53, told podcast guest Tyler Perry.

“I bumped into a girlfriend of mine at a Bar Mitzvah and she said, ‘How are you?’ and I started sobbing, and I wasn’t entirely sure why.”

“She said, ‘I’m going to write down the name of my therapist,’ ” the Live with Kelly and Mark host explained, laughing at the memory.

In her 2002 memoir, Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories, Ripa shared that she has struggled with a severe case of social anxiety disorder.

“I tend to say awkward or inappropriate things when under duress,” Ripa wrote. “People think that because I’m an extrovert on television I am one in real life. Surprise. That’s why they call it acting.”

Through therapy, Ripa shared on the podcast, “I really got to know myself. I really got to understand why I had such trouble embracing success of any kind.”

Perry, 54, said that while he’s never been to a therapist, writing is therapeutic for him. Exploring his characters’ motivation, he shared, prompted him “in my own life, when I do things I’d be like, ‘Why did you do that? What was that about? Were you upset? Were you angry? What happened?’ ”

“And then memories will come and triggering things will come and like, ‘Oh that’s why you feel that way. Okay, how do we undo that? How do we turn that around?’ ” continued Perry, whose life story will be revealed in tomorrow’s debut of the Prime documentary Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story.

“So writing characters and developing them helped me kind of understand a lot of my own emotional stuff,” he said, adding, “I’m not opposed to therapy. And who knows, maybe one day I will. But I’ve managed to get through a lot of it so far, just with the writing.”

Ripa chimed in that Perry may have someone in his life acting as a de facto therapist anyway, saying, “I feel like when Oprah is your best friend, like, she was my earliest therapist. I know she was your earliest therapist. She was America’s first therapist.”

“We didn’t know we were getting therapy, but we were,” Ripa continued, referencing The Oprah Winfrey Show, which aired from 1986 to 2011, and tackled topics like race, weight-loss, drug addiction and divorce.

“And she hasn’t had it either,” Perry shared, something Ripa called “fascinating.”

“When I think of a person who is the most therapy-minded person, I would think it’s Oprah.”

While Winfrey herself isn’t in therapy, Perry shared that she introduced him to the therapeutic process of journaling — which he said led to “everything else, writing it down.”

“On her show, she said it was cathartic to write things down. I had to go find a dictionary to look up what cathartic meant,” Perry quipped, adding that writing things down “feels good…It feels good to talk about the pain. It seemed as if it was physically coming out of me and going onto the page. That was really revelatory for me.”

source: people.com