Kelly Ripa revealed she started going to therapy after an unexpectedly emotional moment with an old friend.
Ripa, 53, opened up to guest Tyler Perry about her experience on her “Let’s Talk Off Camera” podcast.
“I went into therapy when I turned 40,” Ripa explained.
“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 recalled with a laugh.
“I really got to know myself,” Ripa said after going to therapy. “I really got to understand why I had such trouble embracing success of any kind.”
The TV personality has always been candid about her struggles with social anxiety disorder.
“I tend to say awkward or inappropriate things when under duress,” Ripa wrote in her 2022 memoir “Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories.”
“People think that because I’m an extrovert on television I am one in real life. Surprise. That’s why they call it acting.”
Elsewhere in the book, Ripa recalled a conversation she had with a therapist in the past.
“I have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. I almost always wake up crying at the thought of having to go to work. I feel like I’m in physical pain. My hair hurts. I have no energy at all. I’m very easily distracted.”
“When I’m playing with my kids, I feel like I’ve forgotten to do something at work, and when I’m at work, I feel like I’ve forgotten to do something for my kids,” she revealed. “I cry in the shower. I cry myself to sleep. I cry backstage. I sometimes want to cry in the middle of the show. Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe.”
Back on the podcast, Perry revealed he’s never partaken in therapy, but claimed Meghan Markle spoke to him “like a therapist” when she and Prince Harry left the royal family and moved to California in 2020.
He also explained that writing has become very therapeutic, and it’s a process he learned could be “cathartic” from his good friend Oprah.
“On her show, she said it was cathartic to write things down,” the 54-year-old director said. “I had to go find a dictionary to look up what cathartic meant. 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.”