There’s a sentence I hear in some form almost every week, and it always arrives with an apology attached: “I should be able to handle this with one session a week.” Sometimes it’s said by someone whose life has gotten genuinely harder in the last few months. Sometimes it’s said by someone who has been white-knuckling something for years and has finally run out of margin. Either way, the sentence is doing the same job — it’s converting a clinical question into a verdict about

Ask most people what the hard part of therapy is and they’ll describe the session. The talking. The crying in front of a stranger. The forty-five minutes of looking directly at something they’d been managing not to look at. That’s not usually it. The hard part is Thursday. It’s the argument at 9pm on a Saturday, three days out from your last session and four days from the next one, when everything you worked on evaporates and you handle it exactly the way you always have. It’

Every August, my calendar, along with my colleagues, tells the same story. The details change from person to person, but the shape is remarkably consistent: someone books a session because they've been feeling wound up, irritable, or strangely on edge, and they can't point to a reason. Nothing bad has happened. Work is fine. The family is fine. And yet their sleep has gotten thinner, their fuse has gotten shorter, and there's a low hum of dread they can't attach to anything s

It's 2 a.m., something's heavy on your chest, and there's a chatbot right there — free, awake, and endlessly patient. So you start typing. Millions of people are doing exactly this in 2026, and if you're one of them, there's no shame in it. The pull is real: it's instant, it never judges, and it never sighs. As a licensed clinical social worker, I'd rather talk honestly about this than pretend it isn't happening. AI has a place. It also has hard limits — and knowing the diffe

You're sitting still. Nothing is wrong, exactly. And yet your chest is tight, your thoughts are moving too fast, and there's a low hum of dread you can't trace to anything. So you do what most of us do at 1 a.m.: you type "why am I anxious for no reason" into your phone and hope something makes it make sense. If that's you, take a breath. You're not broken, and you're far from alone — anxiety is the number-one reason people begin therapy. And here's the part worth holding ont

In thirteen years of clinical work, I've noticed something that surprises people when I name it out loud: the bravest clients I've worked with, the ones who survived things that should never happen to anyone, are often the hardest on themselves. They can extend endless grace to others. They understand, intellectually, that what happened to them wasn't their fault. And yet, when the conversation turns inward, the tone shifts. "I should be over this by now." "Other people have