The other day I made an offhand joke to a fellow teacher about something my therapist often tells me, which in itself isn’t unusual…but I said it in front of my fourth grade students, which I think is a little unusual for me. It’s been an extremely long and stressful week so my filter isn’t as locked down as usual; normally I’m more careful about the company I’m in when I say such things. Or, at least, I don’t make a habit of mentioning such things in front of my younger students. As it was, I had said it so quietly that some of them hadn’t caught it. It was only when they asked what I’d said, and one of their peers repeated it, that I realized what had happened. It was the sound of my words getting fed back into my ears in the voice of a student (“She said that her therapist says…”) that brought me to attention. We were transitioning to the next class period, so I had just enough time and brainpower to spare for the consideration of whether I should address the matter. I then decided I shouldn’t.

Because I didn’t say anything that was wrong.

Do I discuss intimate details of my personal mental health matters with my students, of any age? Absolutely not. Do I behave as if everything is fine all the time? Absolutely not.

I am a strong advocate for teaching children about how to recognize and navigate and talk about their feelings. Sometimes that means modeling what that looks like. If I have a day where I’m feeling sad because I miss my dog who we had to put down in December, I explain those feelings to my students and we have a conversation about what we can do when we’re feeling sad. If they’re feeling anxious about student-led conferences coming up this month, I give them time and space to feel those feelings for a bit, and then we discuss strategies and plans for how we can manage that anxiety. And while I don’t think I’ve mentioned to them that I see a therapist before now, I’ve certainly mentioned it to my colleagues, and my decision not to make a big thing out of the comment I made does something very important, in the same vein as the other social-emotional learning work I do.

I am disempowering a faux pas here.

Open, honest discussion of mental health support has historically been so forbidden. But combatting that taboo is doable not with big fanfare, but with the exact opposite. Normalization is achieved by allowing it to be part of casual conversation and experience. Calling attention to what I’d said would have turned it into a Thing, and it doesn’t need to be. If I model that being open about how I cope with my mental health needs is okay, others, from elementary school students on upward to adults, may internalize that and be more inclined to seek out support they need with less fear of stigma.

I have students who I happen to know are seeing therapists. Certain peers of theirs know about that in some cases; in other cases, they keep that information very much to themselves. The decision of whether or not to share is of course completely personal and should be respected either way. But, it’s occurred to me this week that demonstrating for them that it’s okay to not have to keep that a secret can have significant impact. I know this because on occasions when other adults have casually made comments about their own therapists, it has positively impacted me. There’s a feeling of an emotional boost, almost like a little jolt of extra helium when you’re inflating a balloon, when you hear someone mention that they’re receiving mental health support just like you are. A burden is eased, because we get to consider that therapy isn’t a burden. The reasons we seek support are heavy enough without giving unnecessary weight to the fact that we’re getting help. It directly combats the internalized schema that mental health is a Thing that “others” deal with and isn’t an issue for “normal” people; it truly helps to know we aren’t alone.

I know that my experience is limited to only the people and places in my life, and statistically speaking, one person’s observations are mathematically insignificant. But just this week, several other adults I know have made casual mention of their therapists in random conversations. It wasn’t made a Thing. It wasn’t a big deal. And as such, it absolutely was — because we are normalizing that discussion in small but mighty ways. The stigma associated with seeing a therapist is so societally ingrained that such discussion is likely to bring initial pause, but the change comes when we ignore that pause and proceed with being appropriately open and honest. I’m only one person. But I’m sensing the beginnings of a positive shift.

Normalize talking about feelings, about mental health, about therapy. Not with drastic sweeping measures, but with smaller, toothbrush-sized strokes. It’s not with huge top-down change all at once, but with good little changes day to day, that the world will be made a better place.