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Braun Strowman On Dealing With Mental Health Issues, His Conversation With Vince McMahon, Importance Of Asking For Help

November 4, 2020 | Posted by Blake Lovell
WWE RAW Braun Strowman Gauntlet Match

In a recent interview on Chasing Glory with Lillian Garcia, Braun Strowman discussed dealing with mental health issues in 2019, his conversation with Vince McMahon, the importance of asking for help, and much more. You can read his comments below.

Braun Strowman on dealing with mental health issues and having suicidal thoughts in 2019: “It was just an accumulation of things going on in my life. I went through a really bad breakup and my personal life was a mess, which being a WWE superstar, it’s really hard to balance the road life and your personal life and that’s part of the reason why the relationship didn’t work out. It got to a point where I didn’t feel like I was important at work, so I had no escape. My mind and everything were all over the place and I was by myself. I had just moved into a new house – the house of my dreams and I bought this house on a lake, and I’d been in there like six or seven months at this point and the only thing I had was a mattress on the floor in one of the rooms and a ringside chair sitting in the living room. I’d get home from the road and it was just weird – I’d sit there in an empty chair in the empty living room in the empty house and sit there for like seven hours at a time. I couldn’t kick out of this funk I was in.”

On his conversation with Vince McMahon about his worth in WWE: “I went to Vince to talk about some stuff I was having problems with, and it really pissed me off that the dirt sheets and the clickbait stuff tried to spin this whole thing that I wanted to commit suicide because I was mad with how I was being booked in WWE, and that’s just the complete and total opposite end of it. WWE was my only thing positive I had in my life at that point, and I was so mentally hard on myself with what was going on in my personal life that I let it start affecting my business life when in the grand scheme of things, I have the most amazing job on earth. But I got to a point where I felt like a number in the system and like ‘I need to address this.’

“I went in and talked to Vince and we sat down and literally had a father-son conversation where he gave me a sense of reassurance and sense of wealth that I thought I didn’t have that was just like ‘Wow.’ I can’t thank him enough for taking the time because at the end of the day, he has so much stuff going on……you know how awesome of a human he is and how loyal he is. The whole narrative that people try to push that he’s this monster makes me so mad because I know what type of man he really is……it kindled even more of a friendship that I have with him and it was nice. I’m forever indebted to him taking the time to give me his reassurance that ‘Hey you’re not just coming to work for no reason.’ You’re coming to work because I need you here, I want you here, and you’re one of the reasons why our show is successful. That’s what I needed to hear to give me that reassurance that ‘Man it’s not as bad as I think it is.'”

On the importance of reaching out and asking for help when dealing with mental health issues: “That helped me kick out of that funk in my personal life – that was right after my uncle passed away so a lot of that spiraled me out of control. I realized ‘Screw that, I’ve got millions of people, kids, men, women all around the world that look up to me.’ How selfish, not only to them but to my family – I get it, stuff gets hard in life, and you think these thoughts. But at the end of the day, it’s very, very selfish. I don’t think people think about the repercussions of what it does to other people, and it’s really scary because that was one of the biggest things where I was like ‘I can’t do this, there’s no way I could do this to myself because my god what is this gonna do to my parents, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, my friends, my fans around the world that look up to me and lean on me?’

“It showed so much when I talked about this in the documentary that people not only lean on me but all the other WWE superstars – how much people lean on each other. When human beings work together in a cohesive unit, we’re unstoppable. It’s just finding somebody that’s there and finding a friend and reaching a hand out. Don’t be afraid to ask. That was what I was so worried about for a long time. I play this big macho character – I’m 6-8 and 350 pounds – and this whole stigma of big men aren’t supposed to have emotions or aren’t supposed to think like that, it’s hogwash. Everybody goes through stuff. Mental health is so not talked about, and I feel like it should be. That’s one of the biggest problems with so much craziness in the world, and it’s just reaching out or knowing that someone is going through something and you reach out and help them.”

If using any of the above quotes, please credit Chasing Glory with Lillian Garcia with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.