Most of what gets published about mental health is advice, and advice assumes the problem is not knowing.
Five signs, seven habits, the checklist that spares you the trouble of examining your actual situation. The people I work with are not short on knowing. They've read the lists; most could write them. What's missing is a place to slow down and explore the nuances of a situation, in full sentences.
That is what this blog is for. Every other week I'll write on topics I know well after twenty-five years of clinical practice: issues and dynamics that show up, in one form or another, in the therapy room. Some of those topics are perennial. Others appear with more frequency and urgency lately, in ways that are hard to ignore.
What happens in people's interior lives when the pace of change in the world around them outstrips their ability to absorb it?
Some of what's coming, so you know whether to stay: an essay about business exits, and why the owner who sells after thirty years often discovers the estate plan was the easy part. The long stage before burnout, when everything still technically works and the effort behind "I'm fine" keeps climbing where no one can see it. Also, a question I'll be taking to a regional conference this fall: what free time is actually for, and why so many of us answer an open stretch of it by manufacturing a project to fill it.
Underneath much of this, and worth its own look: what happens in people's interior lives when the pace of change in the world around them outstrips their ability to absorb it, socially, technologically, and otherwise. That gap is showing up in sessions more than it used to, and the people least likely to say so are often the ones carrying the most of it.
I write the way I work: following threads, making observations, and exploring topics that merit a deeper dive. That holds in the therapy room, and it holds for essays. Nothing here will tell you what your situation means. The aim is narrower and more useful: to describe the territory accurately enough that if you're standing in some part of it, you recognize the ground.
There are threads running through every life. They run beneath the noise, beneath the presenting version — quieter than both, and older. They connect who you were, who you are, and who you are still becoming. These essays follow them. The first one arrives tomorrow.
This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, a therapeutic relationship, or clinical advice.