Shortly after my first wife and I decided to get a divorce, we met with a mediator and found ourselves staring across a small conference table, adversaries for the first time in our 35 year marriage.  It was awful.

The mediator had asked the two of us what we wanted from one another, what we were prepared to give each other, what we needed and could afford.

My wife had her own job and career, but I made more money than she did the burden was on me to make sure she was comfortable, something I very much wanted to do.

I remember feeling horrible that we had come to this, and I was desperate for her to be safe and happy, as is often the case when people end long marriages. The mediator asked what I thought I could pay each month in alimony.

I was surprised, I hadn’t expected to pay alimony, but I said without any hesitation, “oh, I can pay $9,000 a month.” The mediator gave  me a long and hard look, she had seen my tax returns and I had never looked at them, my wife handled all of our finances. I said I would run the numbers by my financial adviser.

I didn’t tell her that I didn’t really have a financial adviser, only someone who handled what was left of my rapidly vanishing IRA.

“Mr. Katz,” she said before closing up her folder and advising each one of us to get an attorney. “I think you need to be your own financial adviser.”

I know I lived in delusion, I  did not take responsibility for my life. Like many other people who live with grandiose rescue delusions, I was living out of reality. I not only did not have anywhere near $9,000 to give Paula, I didn’t have enough money to pay the mortgage or my mounting credit card bills.

I was a best-selling author, HBO had just made a movie based on one of my books, I had a book contract for three more books. Surely, I thought, one of them would be big, a best-seller again. One would surely draw a  movie deal. I was a big shot after all, I  was on television all the time, I was sent on fancy book tours all over the country.

My next book, I remember telling Maria, who was then my best friend, would “be big.” When it came out, I could settle all of my debts, pay my wife whatever she needed. I did not feel mortal, I did not stop spending money I didn’t have, I did not for a minute accept that I was broke and would almost certainly have to go bankrupt.

That did not occur to me for a year or so, when publishing was devastated by the Great Recession, my farm had been on the market for three long and expensive years, the Internet had all but destroyed hard cover book sales, and my bank account and savings had bled to death.

I have a friend who is a musician, and is  broke like many musicians these days, and yet he won’t even think of getting a job or changing his work because he is working on yet another song, which will be big and provide for  his  family and other needs.

This is eerily familiar to me, his big album was my big book.

I have too many friends who are waiting for gurus, wizards, geniuses to come into their lives and fix them, give them money, show them how to make more, rescue them. I call it the “rich person” fantasy. I have a friend wearing himself out running a small business, like the farmers here, he went into debt to save  himself. There is always someone on the horizon, he tells me, waiting to offer magical solutions, maybe a wealthy person who wants to buy his business and absorb his debts.

I have another friend who lives with a severely impaired person, her house has grown filthy, cat leavings and dirt everywhere. She doesn’t seem to know that this is an over the line and unacceptable way to live. She is getting help, and my wish for her is that her delusions are destroyed, just as mine were.

These stories sound a lot like me, and it always hard for me to hear them.

When things fell apart, and I finally got the help I had always needed, my delusions were shattered. I began to understand that only I was responsible for my life, and I had to embrace that responsibility and pursue it. I began to understand that there would be no “big” book or movie deal or fat contract to save me from myself.

I was the only one who could do that.

I had to go to the place of my pain, gradually and painstakingly deprive it of its power over me, because I could readily see that pain was the mother of delusion, a fantasy escape from it. So when I began to see reality, and with the help of a tough-minded and blunt therapist – “Jon, you have lost all perspective…” I entered the pain and experienced its true rawness and misery.

Pain, writes Henry J.M. Nouwen, “is the experience of not receiving what you most need. It is a place of emptiness where you feel sharply the absence of the love you most desire. To go back to that place is hard, because you are confronted there with your wounds, as well as with your powerlessness (and helplessness) to heal yourself. You are so afraid of that place that you think of it as a place of death. Your instinct for survival makes you run away and go looking for something else…”

This was true of my delusions, they were nothing but an escape, a place to hide from the pain and heartbreak that I carried deep inside of me.

Maria also lived with a great illusion, that she was worthless and unable to find her voice or make art that was any good. it was how she escaped her great pain, and allowed the people around her to marginalize her and mistreat her.

Over these years, this illusion, this lie about herself, has also crumbled and begin to fall apart. She accepted the reality – she is different – and embraced it, and that is the truth.

She is now  living in reality, she has done every single thing she set out to do.

So I went to the place of my pain with the new knowledge that I was setting out to find a new place, I faced the reality of my life, and in so doing, it became less fearful than the illusion itself. I learned I could take care of myself, I didn’t need a big book or a rich savior or a mysterious wizard riding on a big white horse.

I know how much money I have in the bank, I check it almost every day. I don’t expect anyone to rescue me, nor do I need rescuing.  I can take care of myself and stand in my truth.

Knowing, rather than running and hiding in illusions, is the path to security and peace of mind. I have faced the worst truths about myself and acknowledged them. I have no secrets, nothing to hide.

The deeper the roots I planted in my new life the less the pain and fear that I felt. It just required my being honest to myself and to other people, and living in delusion and fantasy is not honesty, it is deception, it leads to nothing but panic and sorrow.

Anna Freud wrote that panic attacks occur when we lie to ourselves, and i kept telling myself one lie after another. I was better than that, and i am better than that now.

I mourned my pains and wept over them in order so that they could leave me bit by bit. I felt I was becoming free. I didn’t need to live in melancholy and panic.

I would never have a perfect life or lose consciousness of my weaknesses. I will never forget that I am broken inside.

But I could still have my life, and love my life, and that is so much better than my delusions.