Door to a new world

Lifestyle – Michael Hegarty had a successful career in banking and finance until his world fell apart in 2008 when his marriage of 36 years ended. At a crossroads, he tentatively moved in a new direction and has since gone on to train and practise as a psychotherapist.  His own therapy sessions helped heal deeply buried childhood traumas and changed his life. He has now written a book on talk therapy to help others appreciate its benefits, as he tells BERNIE NÍ FHLATHARTA.

Never was the saying ‘when one door closes, another one opens’ as true as it was for one man who found himself on a journey of self-discovery, which led to a whole new career.

That’s exactly how Michael Hegarty became a psychotherapist, an occupation he had never anticipated.

Not only has the former banker and financial consultant been working as a psychotherapist for the past 10 years but he has just written a book explaining what’s involved.

To put it simply, it’s a practical and structured approach to talk therapy – as it says on the cover. And already, Gateways to Psychotherapy has been well received among his peers and readers at home and abroad.

Michael is brutally honest in the book’s introduction about how he stumbled into therapy. He floundered when his marriage of 36 years broke up in 2008 and says he was lost in body and soul, despite his work, swimming sessions in the gym, hill walking and fishing on the Corrib.

He didn’t think twice when his son, David, suggested he enrol in a philosophy course. This was the start of a new journey for him, one that would take him into the inner workings of his mind.

It was an emotional journey that brought hidden, repressed childhood trauma to the fore, memories of child abuse, (being sexually abused more than 400 times over two-and-a-half years, from age 12, until he put up his fists to the man responsible, who turned and walked away, looking for his next victim) abandonment (his mother disappeared for six months when he was just six. She was actually in Holles Street Hospital in Dublin) and the day-to-day struggle of being one of 12 children.

The family moved many times to accommodate his father’s banking job which resulted in Michael changing primary schools five times. He was born in Nenagh but lived in Westport, County Mayo; Tullow, County Carlow; Enniscorthy, County Wexford; and Kenmare, County Kerry, before he himself joined the bank straight from Leaving Cert at 17.

He subsequently lived and worked in Castletownbere, West Cork; Doon, County Limerick; Dunlavin, County Wicklow; Dunmanway, West Cork; and Cork City before arriving in Galway in 1981.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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