I think this is my fourth or fifth proposal I’ve ever written? But this one pretty much wrote itself. I started thinking about it the week of the inauguration and I started putting it together in earnest sometime last week. I started the sample chapter on Tuesday before I drove an hour away for an all day meeting and then finished it yesterday (Wednesday) between clients and it was super smooth, super quick. I’ve never written a solid 4000 words so easily before.

I sent two queries to agents yesterday and heard back from one last night to send the proposal so they have it and we’ll see. But the ease of it all bodes well, I think. It feels the same it felt to be looking for this house. There were disappointments along the way (houses we bid on and didn’t get) but the timing was perfect and the house we’re in is better than the ones we lost.

Of course now that I sent the package I think it’s the wrong sample chapter or that the promise of the query letter, (which is really good) isn’t borne out by the proposal. But if not them, maybe the next one and meanwhile I can work on another sample chapter or at least organize my notes for the rest of it.

I want to write this both because I want people to read it but also because I’m hoping it levels things up for me career-wise and brings me more client opportunities.

Probably at some point I’ll talk about my great big writing epiphany that I had at the retreat in Taos but right now I have a chock full day of client intensity ahead of me (tr*mp is distressingly good for the therapy business) so I’m just here to say that the proposal is out. This is a stand against my old idea that talking about good things makes them disappear. Either the book will get sold or it will not but at least for now I can enjoy riding this wave.

Becca’s recent post made me think about reading habits, specifically the reading habits of my troubled youth when I read everything and anything without any discernment or even opinion.

My parents were both big readers. My mom’s favorites were Pearl S. Buck and Jean Auel and trashy romance. My dad’s favorites were Hemingway, Joseph Keller and trashy spy novels. So this is what I read, too. At least once I got past fifth or sixth grade and noticed what they were reading.

My dad had moved out by then but his books stayed for a long time. They came off of the shelves and lived in boxes in the basement. I must have gone through them but I’m not sure why I would pick whatever I’d pick. I remember being murderously offended by Jerzy Kosiński’s Blind Date (look how even that little tidbit calls it “erotically charged” when it’s nothing but rape, rape and more rape) and depressed by An Unmarried Man (where the protagonist’s mistress masturbates with a candle).

I felt like I should like Jean Auel but also got bored and was super annoyed by the tall, blonde woman trope (even cavemen yearn for a Cover Girl!) and all of the raping.

(Between my stepmom’s Cosmopolitan magazine and my parents’ novels I felt very depressed and resigned to the inevitably of sexual violence framed as erotic.)

I rode my bike to the bookstore with my babysitting money and an Anne of Green Gables book was $3.95, which meant I could take a five dollar bill and come home with something new to read. I think I bought science fiction there, too. It was a very small bookstore and there wasn’t much to browse so I’d buy from authors I’d already read, often books from the school library that I wanted to keep. I spent the rest of my money on 6-packs of diet chocolate soda because I was always hungry and also always worried about getting fat. The cans would poke me uncomfortably all the way home in my backpack and then I’d put them in the ‘fridge, each can designated to a day.

Once I had a car I could get myself to the Village Bookshop, which was a buy out bookstore (some used books, too) and was housed in an old church with creaky floors. I’d come in and go straight to the second floor where the novels lived. This is where I first found my beloved green books (Virago Modern Classics) and Dial Press, (which I think were Viragos before they were Virago and were black) and I also bought a lot of Penguin Books with the orange spine. These books were $1.49 apiece so I would bring a ten dollar bill and leave with nine books.

I absolutely 100% judged all the books by their covers because how else was I going to pick them out? I don’t know where all of those books went because I shed them all of the time, every time I moved. In our second to last move (from our house to the apartment), I gave away 11 bankers boxes of books and then in this last move when I dismantled my therapy office, I gave away another six or seven.

The Village Bookshop Books that stayed with me the most are:

• This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (already addressed in this here blog), which I’ve given away and repurchased several times. My current copy is a used one with someone else’s highlights.
• Several Milan Kundera books, after discovering Life is Elsewhere (I no longer have that one but I remember the figure of a man with a dog’s head gazing off into the distance).
• Face by Cecile Pineda, that also has rape but the rest of it is so interesting that I’d go back to it again and again anyway, re-grappling with that scene on every reread.
• The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth, which seemed like one of my dad’s books because it was so annoying and sexist but also is why I still say, “I have a hand like a foot” whenever I’m dealt cards.
• Precious Bane by Mary Webb, a small book that’s so lovely and romantic but so good that it ruined me for my mother’s bodice rippers forever.
• The Frost in May quartet by Antonia White, which is how I know that there is a difference between the immaculate conception and the virgin birth.
• 1982 Janine, a bizarre book that went completely over my head but that was written so bizarrely that my counterculture, angry little self couldn’t help but admire it (the protagonist attempts suicide in the novel and it looks like this:)

By 1982, Janine, Fair use, Link

I finished everything whether I liked it or not. I read not just for entertainment but like a hoarder, like someone famished at an indifferent buffet. I wanted to be able to mark it off a list (even though I have never kept a list of what I’ve read, never used Goodreads or anything like that). I had opinions — disagreements, certainly — but always deferred to the book itself assuming that if it were published it had an unimpeachable respectability and authority.

I failed as an English major in part because I felt appalled by all the criticism, all the knowing we were expected to have, like we knew better than the authors. I wanted to use books to illustrate my life, slotting them in like metaphors and my professors wanted me to break them down into little knowable pieces. It was tempting but I felt like it would ruin my favorites. I thought being an English major would help me live inside books but instead we were showing them to be flimsy things.

That scared me, my beloved books.

But that’s another story.

I’m trying to set up a community for parents trying to parent in the midst of unprecedented and horrific historic events and apparently I had the exact same idea eight years ago because I just found my notes for it. Back then I was calling it “Parenting for Hope” and this time around I called it “Safe Space for Parents.”

I never got Parenting for Hope off the ground because I couldn’t figure out how to do it. In real life groups for parents are notoriously difficult to make happen. I’d always have parents begging me for classes or groups and I’d set them up and no one would come because people have soccer and have to make dinner and there’s homework to supervise, etc. etc. This time I thought it’d be easier because it’s virtual but so far only one and a half takers.

It may be the format, which is tricky if you’re used to Facebook but also if people could get used to it, it allows for a lot more intimacy.

I don’t know. I can’t really move it to the more FB type community space I have with my courses because I can only have one community there and I’ve left it a general community.

Anyway.

I’d like it to happen. I think the way forward is finding each other. But maybe everyone should just go to a nice little Reddit sub. Who knows?

I feel like I’m walking a mental health tightrope but also that I’ve gotten much better at balancing given that I’ve been therapizing through this kind of mess for a long time now.

I was thinking about that when M was talking about her feelings about voting. She was 12 when tr*mp was first elected. For her, politics have never worked; they’ve never been about her. In fact, they’ve actively pushed against her. Gen Z has watched their wants, wishes, and needs been shoved aside over and over again, even by the party that ostensibly represents her.

I don’t know what those Gen Z kids are going to do. They’re some of the most progressive interesting people and they’ve also got more than their fair share of trad wives and proud boys.

I just don’t know.

But then who does know?

This is basically the largest exposure response prevention program ever. Anxiety craves certainty the only thing we can be certain of is that it’s going to suck and be chaotic and that people will suffer. But how much? And when? And in what particular way? And how are we supposed to handle it?

One of the things that I know people have to face is the reality that most of us will NOT be hiding Ann Frank in our attic. We tell ourselves that we would be those people but statistically, most of us will not. And so one of the things that crumbles is our idea of ourselves as heroes; we are forced to face our own selfish humanity. That’s what survival sometimes looks like.

In the camps, survival could explicitly depend on one’s willingness to steal someone else’s bread crust. The best book I’ve read about this is This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowiski. I think I found that book (at the Village Bookstore, natch) when I was 15 or 16?

My dad, like lots of Jewish men his age, was obsessed with WWII so my limited Judaism was entirely defined by anti-semitism. We never went to temple, we only celebrated a slapdash version of Hanukkah but by god, we saw those pictures and got lectured about the pogroms. Judaism wasn’t about being Jewish for me; it was about being hated.

So I knew about the holocaust but that book, Borowski’s book, was the one that really and truly brought it home for me. (Note: Borwoski wasn’t Jewish. He was in the camps because he was a political resister.)

Anyway. I think about survivor’s guilt a lot. In my line of work I see it come up so often. For adoptees who were adopted into safer families; for adult children whose lives turned out better than their parents’; for siblings who outgrew their family dysfunction. On and on and on. We are meant to grow but sometimes growing means pushing past and not stepping back to lend a hand because the hand is not welcome or the hand isn’t asking for help; it’s trying to pull you back down.

This moving forward anyway is not the same thing as actively pulling the ladder up behind you but it can feel like it. A lot (A LOT) of people stay stuck because growth would be a betrayal and it would mean ostracism. (Ask me how I know.)

This is some of what I’ve been hearing over the last 8+ years — this collapse not just of people’s feelings of safety and security but also their sense of who they would be in such situations. They thought they’d be on the front lines or giving away all of their cash or opening their homes to strangers and they’ve discovered that’s not, actually, who they are. And that is another kind of loss. That’s another way people are demoralized.

What’s that meme that went around for awhile? People did not watch enough Twilight Zone and it shows. Maybe we’re not going to join the other lottery participants in throwing stones at the winner but we’re also probably not going to be throwing our bodies between the crowd and the victim. Instead we discover the best we’ll do is slink off to the back of the crowd and then write a strongly worded email to our representative.

I have no judgment here — I really don’t because I see everyone is just kinda trying to keep their head above water, especially those who are actively parenting (thus my want to create a safe space). I think it takes all kind of effort and that finding our way is a process and there is need in the revolution for strongly worded emails, too. I’m just saying that some of the deep sadness I am witnessing (and feeling) is this recognition that most of us will not be heroes on the level of Malala (that’s what exceptional means, folks).

Oh well. Need to head into a full day of counseling! And so I will stop here.

Before I get into this, let me say that I am (more or less) all right. I wasn’t for a while but I am right now. So this is not particularly about me but if you have other therapists in your life, you might want to check in on them.

If you’ll recall, over Covid talking about mental health became more of a thing, which is great. Lots of the self care articles begin and end with “go see a therapist!” but of course therapy is not accessible for everyone and folks rightly began to push back about it. Unfortunately the conversations threw therapists under the bus:

1. People thought therapists should make themselves more accessible — offer more sliding scale slots, get on more insurance panels, flex their schedule for more evenings and weekends. In other words, individual therapists should fix the problems of capitalism.
2. Venture funding realized mental health might be lucrative and began to exploit therapists (and their clients) in order to line their pockets.

In practice, this meant that a whole lot of shady companies came out of the woodwork and at first set up business practices that looked like they’d help therapists with all of these accessibility problems.

Now therapists do not make a lot of money. Some do; most don’t. One reason I get super annoyed watching therapy on TV is the therapists all live like Frasier Crane.

As if.

You may think your therapist is rich because you know how much they charge but their hourly rate is not an actual 40-hour a week hourly rate. Not for any single therapist! No therapist whose Psychology Today profile says they make $150 an hour is making $6000/week!

Ok so your therapist is not rich especially if they’re taking insurance.

You need to know that insurance is a goddamn NIGHTMARE. Insurance companies are predatory and are not interested in your well being or in your therapist’s well being. Insurance companies want to CUT COSTS and they do this by controlling how much your therapist gets paid, when they get paid, and whether or not they can justify what they’re trying to get paid. (Look up clawbacks — therapists live in terror of clawbacks!)

You have to watch this, too. Because UHC (Optum) is buying up group therapy practices, too. They OWN therapists (not all of whom know that they are working for Optum). They also own all the records. That’s right — your private case notes, your hopes and dreams, your secret confessions. Yup.

Insurance controls the course of your treatment. Most companies are not super awful about this but they will come and yell at your therapist for charging for a 90837 (53+ minutes) instead of a 90834 (38 to 52 minutes). The difference in what the therapist earns is significant but insurance companies HATE to pay for 53+ minutes.

(When I was taking a particular Medicaid their rate for 90837 was $89. For 90834 was $67. I see most of my clients for 55+ minutes so that’s what I charged and I got a nasty letter about it. I quit soon after because they cut the telehealth fee to $72/hour for 90837 WITHOUT WARNING.)

How insurance works is they say to therapists, “Sign a contract with us and we’ll send you clients but our clients get a deal and can see you at a percentage of your hourly rate.” This is one reason why therapists have a higher rate — because they need to have one that’s MORE than insurance will pay because insurance will look at what a therapist is making and mess with it. Like Insurance A pays $85 and Insurance B pays $65 and Insurance A gets wind of it and says, “Hey! I see you’re accepting a much lower rate for this other company so we’re going to pay THAT rate!” Or they’ll say, “We hear tell that other therapists in your area are charging $100 and we’ve been paying you $105 of your $125 fee but to heck with that; we’re dropping you to $100, too!

Insurance is also often screwing YOU as the buyer. Most alarming is that some companies are now demanding your records (really theirs because you sign away your HIPAA rights to use insurance) to train their AI meant to put therapists out of business.

Historically most insurance companies didn’t request records beyond your diagnosis so they could decide how many sessions they’d pay for but they are starting to demand them more and more often. Several insurance companies have stated clearly that they are moving to a new structure which goes like:

• Oh are you depressed? Why don’t you use our free app and talk to our AI bot to see if that helps you manage your depression!
• Oh it doesn’t? Why don’t you use one of our Mental Health coaches (NOT a therapist and they pay them much less) and see if that helps!
• Oh it doesn’t? I guess you can see a therapist. For now. Here’s a list of 42 therapists in your area who take our insurance, 29 of whom aren’t taking new clients and 12 retired therapists that we haven’t bothered to remove from the list. So that leaves that one, who we’ve decided to pay 10% of their normal rate. Good luck.

So that’s one way we’re all getting screwed.

The other way is that therapists are allowing Trojan Horses into their practice because they’re overworked, overwhelmed, and just trying to make a living. (We get into this work because we like people not paperwork and many of us suck at paperwork.) So at the front of Covid a whole bunch of therapists I know started working with these huge credentialing companies. These companies were like, “Hey! Sign up with us and we’ll get you paid by credentialing you with all the insurances [a tedious, bureaucratic chore that isn’t always effective] AND we’ll make sure you get paid more! So insurance X usually only pays $85/hour for your area? We’ll get you $95!”

I mean, who wouldn’t sign up? (Me, I did not sign up. Because I’d seen Silicon Valley and knew this was the pizza episode all over again.)

Let’s step back into the Time Machine.

In 1999 I paid for Noah’s entire xmas haul with fake money. For those of you who weren’t around in those heady days, there was no Amazon. No one was shopping online. But investors could see that if they could get people to shop online, it’d be a windfall. So there were all of these insane coupons like $99 off $100 plus free shipping. And you could stack coupons so I got Noah a train table, a wooden Brio train set with all of these Richard Scarry people, a real doctor’s stethoscope and various stuffies and clothes for basically nothing. It was the best xmas ever!

All of those companies were using venture funding to finance our shopping but obviously it was not sustainable. So many of the starts up went under but the ones that remained made bank. (And paved the way for Amazon but I digress.)

Venture funding funds ALL of these mental health start ups, too, and some of them will make it and some won’t but their shady practices will remain.

(Here is a list of start ups. Read between the lines of what they’re offering and remember their goal is to MAKE MONEY. Note how many of them are about making mental health care more affordable — that will mean paying therapists less or easing them out of the process AND it will mean somehow getting money from clients, which means making money off of your information or of decreasing services to you.)

That’s what was happening with these credentialing companies. They were tricking therapists into using them — into becoming dependent on them — and then when the therapist was all in they changed the business model. Obviously they could not continue paying people MORE than they were getting paid (they were using venture funding to make up the difference) so they dropped the fee AND took a cut.

Of course.

PLUS those companies were USING the therapists by recording sessions or demanding case notes to train their AI to build those bots to replace therapists.

That’s right — some of you may not realize that your therapy sessions (perhaps anonymized! Who knows!) are being used to train AI. Nightmare fuel, right?

This is all to say, it’s not great out here for a therapist. It’s a really really really hard job. I mean really hard. I love it but it takes A LOT out of me. It’s getting harder and harder to get paid and the culture is still, “Therapists are rich! Ask them to make it more accessible!”

If we take insurance we are giving up autonomy and opening our practices up to exploitation (now more than ever). If we are using these credential services or AI note taking (that’s a thing! so wild!) or are working with a company owned by Optum, who knows what’s happening.

The way I feel about the field of therapy now is how I felt in 2008 watching the internet change journalism. Watching print fold and compensation drop. That’s what it looks like to me right now.

I do not worry so much for myself because I’m already established and because I am actively trying to build out something else to supplement (although lemme tell you, that has been much harder than I thought!) but I don’t know if I’d encourage anyone else to be a therapist right now. It’s a lot of debt and I’m just not sure what the future holds.

Anyway. Go hug a therapist. They probably need it.

In 2019 I was making more money than I ever have in my life. Tr*mp, unsurprisingly, was terrible for mental health and therefore was good for business.

I said yes to everyone who called even if I barely had room for them. I counseled through my lunch break a couple of times a week. I stretched my hours. I squeezed old clients in when they called to come back. I tried to make room for new clients who’d been referred by their friends.

I went on vacation at the start of 2020 and came back to clients in big crisis (note: all details will be obscured! because confidentiality!) and it felt like vacation was not worth it.

(Here is a thing about therapists and vacation: If you take one you have to assign back up therapists for your most fragile clients and you have to go over their coping plans before you go and yes, you worry but try not to because it is, after all, vacation and only by taking a break can you keep up the pace. But you over schedule the week before to top everyone up and you over schedule the weeks you get back to make up for leaving and sometimes, frankly, vacation doesn’t seem worth it.)

So that was January 2020 and in February our oldest had a chest cold that he just couldn’t get rid of, I remember the second to last time we ate at a restaurant (at the beginning of March) that he was coughing so hard that we left dinner worried.

In March our youngest was on an overnight school trip and I started to feel anxious about her getting home. On Sunday we ate out at an Indian restaurant (a buffet! imagine!) and talked about how we needed to take our youngest there because the food was very good and she’d be annoyed we went without her.

I talked about covid before it was covid in my sessions with clients. I remember making the decision to go remote before we were told we had to. I remember feeling lucky that I’d paid for continuing ed in telehealth a year or so back (at the time I determined that it wasn’t a fit for me — oh the irony)! I had a better idea of what it might look like than my colleagues did and I was sharing what I could on our local therapist FB group. I already had a camera for my computer, I already had paperwork I could send out.

And so I did. Saturday would be the last day in my office and I figured, what, two weeks? We all thought that. I did an intake on that last day and we agreed that in-person would be better so we’d circle back in two weeks.

I never did end up seeing them again.

I thought about what was happening in Italy. I thought about the flu pandemic in 1918. I thought about the YA book I’d just read about yellow fever. I remember we sat Maddi down and talked about how it might look — that there would likely be supply chain issues, that it might feel scary. That we’d muddle through.

So Saturday was my last day in-office (Brett and Maddi were already told they’d be home for work and school respectively) and then Sunday the governor announced the curfew and that all non-essential businesses would be closing. I remember Brett and I were walking across a parking lot to cut through to our running route and I said, “Wow, it’s really happening. This is real.”

I felt determined. Scared and determined. We would do this thing.

I thought it would be worse. I also thought it would be better. Mostly I thought it would be different.

We were living in an apartment building and we decided we wouldn’t be riding the elevators anymore. I was afraid that our vents would put us in danger. We talked about what we would do if our building was put on quarantine — how would we walk the dogs? There was a medical clinic on the first floor of our building and that scared Brett.

I made masks out of bandanas. I went scouring the internet for other masks, too. I was obsessed with preparation and so I was always ahead of the curve. I felt an obligation to this because I was helping clients make decisions and I wanted to share what info I had, the varying opinions, hold space for them to come to their own conclusions.

When the two weeks was up — the two weeks to flatten the curve — some therapists started opening their offices back up because they were desperate. Not all of them were prepared to go online and so they’d just been sitting without income. I felt concerned about this and went looking for info.

Our professional organization was USELESS (I stopped being a member after covid — I am still mad about how little they did for us).

Our licensing board had no idea because it was a public health issue; they had no answers.

I started doing research about it myself and put together a training course. I got our local counseling organization to sponsor it because I’m not a CEU provider (and it costs money and takes time to become one). I said I wanted it to be free so that people would actually access it.

I footnoted the hell out of it — I didn’t give opinions, just info. I pulled out statements from official organizations like the Air Condition Contractors of America to talk about air filtration. I linked to the WHO and to the CDC and to our state info. I said, “This is what they say. These are the things to consider. Here is a reasonable thing to have folks sign. Here’s how to talk to your liability insurance. Here’s what to ask.”

I was proud of that course but also angry. Why was I the one doing it???

At the same time my clients were going off the rails. Not all of them, mind you! Again, no details, but some clients just came apart and I watched them tear at their loved ones, take risks that scared me, become more and more extreme in their views.

I heard about local conflicts from various perspectives — clients talking about each other and each other’s views without knowing that they were talking about each other. (Every town is a small town, ultimately.) I heard all sides; I could see all sides.

I saw how when people get scared, they get mean. I saw how when people are afraid for themselves they will throw each other under the bus. They will switch out their values, tie themselves into knots, give up what’s meaningful to drop into the relief of denial.

I watched friendships, relationships, whole communities fall apart. I watched people betray each other.

It was like this. Person A and Person B were part of group X. Group X made a rule that participants in Group X would abide by certain safety standards. Person A would talk about the relief at feeling safe in Group X because of standards. Meanwhile Person B would tell me how they were violating safety standards.

It’s the terror, right? It’s the way people scramble to cope. Person B needed Group X but also could not/would not abide by the standards. That would happen but I also got to see how Person B would twist themselves up to explain it.

“But it’s ME,” they’d say. “My reasons are more important. Other people should definitely abide by the safety rules but I need to break them.”

That was what I kept hearing, “But it’s ME. MY needs are an exception.”

It became so exhausting to try to figure out how to grow people through this. Like, how do we support the individual and also do our part to keep the community safe? Or is it our job to keep the community safe? And what to do about Person A who doesn’t know about Person B? What about when Person A and Person B start fighting about the standards? What about when they start tearing each other (the community) apart? What if I agree with Person A but also my agreement has no place in the therapeutic relationship? Where do I put my fear and anger? (Consultation is the answer — and my peer consultation group is the ONLY THING that got me through those years.)

I paid rent on my (unused) office for 18 months before I finally realized I wasn’t going back. Medicaid announced they would no longer pay the full amount for telehealth, knocking off $17 an hour for no reason except greed.

That’s when I seriously thought about what it would men to return to in-person.

I was jealous of the therapists who didn’t care or didn’t belief it was unsafe. I wanted to be back in person but I also didn’t want to get sick (or get my loved ones sick or Brett’s parents or my dad who was battling leukemia even though they were going to restaurants or hanging with friends — even then)!

My consultation group talked to a lawyer who said we could make whatever rules we wanted for our offices. We could tell people no shirts, no shoes, no service. And we could also say you have to wear a mask. You have to be vaccinated (although that seemed beside the point by that time). You could say, “Don’t come in even if you have a tickle in your throat!”

I was way more cautious than most of my clients (in part because of clients like Person B who I knew would come into my office sick, who I knew wouldn’t wear a mask because they TOLD me how they were ignoring people’s rules). I’d picture all the tears in therapy and the droplets hanging in the air after they left. I pictured my air cleaner humming too loud for us to hear each other. I pictured having to ask people to sign the forms my liability insurance recommended and arguing with them because it espoused science they didn’t believe in.

Plus I was exhausted. I’d been working more than full time since tr*mp came into office. I won’t even go into the rest of it (how poorly my child was faring during this time, the terrible things that happened that trampled over her mental health and how I’d sit with clients on video and try not to think about her crying in the other room).

I let go of my medicaid clients, a painful but necessary choice. I needed to cut my hours and medicaid had cut my pay so for the first time I dropped down in a more typical schedule.

But still.

And that’s when we started to think seriously about moving.

And I meant it. But I also thought I wouldn’t need to worry about it.

During lockdown I was frantic to give up my practice. I was completely burned out and couldn’t imagine ever not feeling the way that I felt.

I’ll write about that eventually, I think, but not right now. Just know that many therapists fled the field then. So many people retired early because it was just awful.

Anyway. That’s why I started my child anxiety work; the plan was to 86 counseling as soon as I could and I’d fantasize about giving up my license.

Fast forward to today when I’m in a much better place physically emotionally, and mentally (despite, you know, all of THAT) and I no longer want to give up my license.

The mental health field is changing really quickly — another thing I want to write about — and if I hadn’t moved it really woudn’t have impacted me much but moving certainly derailed my practice and I still need my child anxiety work to step up to make up the difference but I’m not looking for it to replace my day job anymore.

It was weird when I realized I wasn’t burned out anymore because I was so used to feeling dread and grief around my practice and it became sort of a habit. Like it was a knee jerk reaction I’d have and it took me a minute to look around and find I was looking forward to clients again.

It’s still messy, mind you. I miss seeing people in person (but do not want to get my Pennsylvania license because this is SUCH a small town that dual relationships would be everywhere) and I miss my play therapy room but even before lockdown I knew my days working with kids were numbered. Even then I wanted to shift to parenting work because I think it’s much more effective and so I felt like saying I worked with kids was sort of setting it up wrong. Because even when I told parents, “YOU will have to do the changing” most of them didn’t believe me because seeing the kids created an expectation for kid changing. It was just built into the system if you see what I’m saying.

(This particularly has to do with little kids, who were also my favorite to work with. I love me a preschooler!!!)

It’s a relief to love my time with clients again. My license is up in a little more than a year and I’m trying to decide what continuing education to get to fill in the rest of my requirements. I am thinking of giving up my supervision designation but I’ll decide for sure when I look at which CEUs are available for it.

It’s nice to be on the other side of burn out because my gosh, that was a terrible terrible terrible place to be and to try to work from. I was so scared of harming my clients with my burn out and that made the burn out even worse. Ugh. Thinking about it makes my throat close up.

Last night my fear got the best of me. It was the way TikTok handled their whole shift into propaganda land that undid me. If you didn’t see it, they had a great big announcement on their front page giving all credit to “President” tr*mp” (who as of this writing is still a few hours away from no longer being a private citizen) and sure enough there was a bunch of, “I hope Gen Z remembers dear leader’s efforts!” and all that noise and it just got to me.

I use TikTok for work (for my child anxiety stuff) and I do occasionally scroll for entertainment and sometimes I look at TikToks my clients send me to explain something they’re experiencing. (My feelings about TikTok diagnosis is complicated — I like when clients are assured that it’s fine that they’re brain does a brain thing but I’m less thrilled when clients begin to cling to a diagnosis that isn’t accurate although I figure that’s a me problem because having a wrong diagnosis only hurts people who then get treated for said wrong diagnosis and likely only helps folks who find some freedom in it. BUT I DIGRESS.)

I had this vision of zillions of grateful people saying, “Hey! Maybe this tr*mp fellow isn’t so bad! Maybe he’s even right about the border and trans people and it’s GOOD to have state owned media run by a habitual liar!” and I got scared.

So that was last night.

This morning, as I look out at the peachy gold-pink clouds and the blue sky peeking out behind snow covered trees I feel calmer. I’m still scared, mind you, because there’s a lot to be scared about but I know I just have to cope (like the rest of us).

Plus there is this whole thing of being a therapist. The other day one of my clients said, “My friends want to know what Dawn says about it” because I am a Voice of Authority (like all therapists), rightly or wrongly. What that means is I can certainly have my own nervous breakdowns but kinda like how a parent needs to step up, therapists have to step up for their clients.

There have certainly been times since 2016 when I’ve wanted to cry in terror with my clients. There have certainly been times when I’ve been more worried for them than they’ve been worried for themselves. There have certainly been times when I have felt just as bereft and hopeless and angry and sad but it is literally my job not to succumb to my emotions and instead somehow hold space for their emotions and do my best to stay regulated in the face of their understandable dysregulation.

And here we go again.

Fortunately instead of being crammed into the too small bedroom of a too small apartment during a global pandemic when there were literal riots in the streets and my daughter was sobbing in the other room I’m in a lovely spacious office looking out at trees.

I’ve also given up in the way that actually allows me to function. You know, in that Buddhist way of not railing against facts (the whole “HOW CAN THIS BE????” phase where I’m so shocked that every new terrible revelation was like having ice water dumped on my head over and over again) and just recognizing that this is where we are. THIS is WHERE we ARE.

This of course was the devastating feeling after the election, right? But once I let myself understand that the election changed NOTHING; it just uncovered what was already true then I knew that I couldn’t keep running from it. Like I couldn’t keep trying to make it NOT so. It IS so. Which is scary, of course, but there’s no way out but through.

I don’t let myself dwell on worst case scenarios, as tempting as they are. I’ve read more than my share of apocalyptic fiction, having been a fan since my punk goth teens, so yes I see the rhythm and rhyme of it. I see the echoes across our history. But that’s also where I find some hope.

Because we HAVE been here. Our ancestors have lived through the same and worse. I’m watching Shogun right now; those were not delightful times. Courtesy of Becca I was reading Ninth Street Women (and realizing I will not finish before the library grabs it back) and Nazis have already marched through NYC.

So I realized what I want to read is the stories of people who got through it. I want to start charting my pathway by leaning on the narratives of survivors.

I very recently learned of Sean Strub’s ties to this area (he was mayor of Milford, the town where I do my grocery shopping) and I just ordered his book about the AIDS crisis.

(As an aside, I listen to Underground 80s while I cook dinner since during tr*mp times I give up on listening to NPR. And the other day they were playing Two Tribes and I feel comforted by listening to our Gen X political dance music as a reminder of the very roots of my righteous anger. Do you remember Dear God? I can’t imagine anyone doing a cover getting it played anywhere mainstream these days.)

As we spiral forward (because I cling to the belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”) we are leaning into dark days but we will curve out of them again. I believe that. I am scared but I am hopeful.

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. day, on this difficult day sullied by an ugly inauguration, I align my thoughts with MLK rather than the other because it’s the only way I will make it through. Because I’ve got clients who need me. I’ve got (grown) kids who need me. And I need myself.

So it goes. So it goes.

My plan here is that I have no plan. I journal everyday but I usually use this app because I like the way it shows me what I was writing about on that day years previously but lately I don’t want to read any of that.

It was super helpful when we were trying to move because I could look back and see what we were thinking then and see how far we’d come but now it just makes me mildly nauseous to revisit covid times.

One of the newer less fun things in my life are hot flashes. I went through menopause during lockdown and the hot flashes were the worst thing about it. (Any brain fog or anxiety or depression I might have experienced were engulfed by the brain fog and anxiety and depression of going through lockdown in a tiny apartment and being a therapist, which I will likely write about later.)

I still get hot flashes but they’re generally tied to stress and sometimes getting one is how I know I’m having a big reaction to something. Like I can’t listen to tr*mp speak because it makes me hot flash. For me, hot flashes first feel like intense nausea and panic. My heart rate shoots up by 20 or 30 BPM. I don’t always get hot and sweaty but the rest is always present.

Good times.

ANYWAY! My point about this is that when I try to have a plan I hot flash so I don’t have a plan. I don’t think too hard about things that send me spiraling. The whole FB in tr*mp’s pocket thing makes me hot flash so I don’t think about it anymore than I have to.

I’m still there — there is no way to disentangle myself professionally or personally — but I don’t want to feel as vulnerable there.

I’m not going to write about this much more but mostly wanted to say that I don’t have any kind of opinion about how anyone else manages this weird reality (and I’m still posting content to my professional accounts so I’m still creating content for the machine so I’m no purist); I’m just trying not to hot flash.