Anthony Rella, MA, LMHC

Author: Anthony Rella

  • Know your worth.

    Know your worth.

    The past couple years have featured a collective purging of unworkable habits around people-pleasing and diplomacy that doesn’t include one’s own needs, along with an embrace of increasing self-assertion and instinctive willfulness that creates more space for one’s self. Today that dialectic wants to be grounded in a love that is bigger than the personal self, in a drive toward beauty that is ambitious and grand, that remembers the past and holds a future aspiration.

    What will you invest into yourself and your life to move you toward greatness? What does greatness mean to you, personally, in your own life? It’s a word that’s loaded up with its own toxicity when it’s attached to ideas of status and fame that really don’t matter to you. If you could set those ideas aside and sit with the question, what would make my life truly great? What would I need to acquire, to learn, to unlearn, to let go of that would increase what is great within my life, my relationships, my family, my community?

    When you know your worth, you know where your value serves and where it does not. You don’t need to be all things for all people. You simply are the best of yourself and find the people and situations that value what is best of you, and find the people and situations that can help you with things that aren’t your best. Spending time knowing yourself in this way gives direction to that energy of self-assertion that might otherwise be too impulsive, too distractible, too lacking in a plan. It harnesses that energy toward your own purpose.

  • Watch what happens, not what is said.

    Watch what happens, not what is said.

    A lesson that I’ve been slow to learn in life is that people don’t always mean the things they say—or they might mean them in the moment, but then immediately forget they said it, or change their mind. Also confusing is that sometimes people speak using words that sound really aggressive or dramatic, and they don’t mean the literal interpretation of their words, rather they are using a dramatic expression to convey the intensity of feeling they’re feeling.

    Regardless of what a person says, what they do tells us more about them. I am reminded of that story from The Princess Bride in which the Dread Pirate Roberts tells his captive, every night, “Goodnight, Westley. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.” This is probably really scary the first dozen times, but eventually one stops believing the threat. After hundreds of mornings not being killed, the threat stops seeming like a literal threat. The behavior says, I value you, I am keeping you around.

    Another measure is the effects of the behavior. If someone says they love you but their behavior consistently leaves you feeling abused, neglected, or diminished—well, it doesn’t matter what they say. It doesn’t matter why they’re acting the way they’re acting. What matters is that you are not experiencing being loved in this relationship, and if the other person truly values you, you need to work together to change that. And if they are unwilling to work with you, then you’re likely better served looking for a relationship in which you experience love.

    With Jupiter in Gemini the tendency to make big pronouncements, empty promises, and ambiguous but scary threats would be pronounced. To listen to those as the earnest truth, or to dismiss them as inconsequential ramblings, neither seem like workable paths forward. But if we can, we can try to be rocks in the river, deeply grounded and letting the flood of words pass over and around us. In this grounded state, not clinging to the words, we have an easier vantage to watch what is really happening.

  • Hope must contend with horror.

    Hope must contend with horror.

    Even if you can get your mind in a state of optimism, ready to move boldly, you might be limited by the fears within and around you. So often this past week I’ve noticed how when someone tries to offer an optimistic perspective it gets met with an almost aggressive despair, with an edge of anger that this other person is not in the despair as well.

    It is hard when we’re not in the same place. Scared and angry people may feel more alone, more terrified when others don’t mirror back these terrifying imaginations of the future. The optimist may well be putting on blinders but they may also know that there’s more to see than the horror, and the horror can freeze us in uselessness without some kind of hope to balance it.

    Let both have their say and know neither cannot tell the full truth because we can never know how the future will unfold. The prophets of doom and the heralds of unrealistic possibility speak for potentials in the moment, not certainties. You need not argue with everything that is said. Only let this tension start to wriggle you out of stuckness.

  • Receive the fall.

    Receive the fall.

    Receive the fall.

    Accept the loss.

    Return to power.

    It’s time to get soft. Bracing for impact only increases the risk of harm should the impact occur. If your body is relaxed and fluid, more energy can move through it with less harm.

    Sometimes we lose, and it is normal to have a whole range of responses to losing, and all of those feelings deserve attention, but there is strength in accepting the loss without surrendering one’s position and values. When we lose, it’s a time to look at whether our strategies are actually working for us, or whether our stories about the world are accurate.

    We might want to grow more rigid and attached to our stories for fear of betraying and abandoning what is dear to us. And that rigidity gets us more hurt. If you can let yourself go with the flow of energy, you are safer and more present to find opportunities to use that energy for your goals and values. If you focus on resisting the flow of energy with all your might, you’re going to take a beating and I’m not certain it’s worth it.

    Earlier this year I reflected upon not falling before we’re thrown, and that remains an important bit of practice that is good to remember when you’re anxious about a future that hasn’t happened yet. The other piece of that is, once you are thrown, to surrender to the fall. To focus on going with the fall and lengthening your body to make as much contact with the ground as you can, to distribute the force of the blow so no one part of you is taking the hit. Fall safely so you can get back up and try again.

    Note: Having done more than a year of these daily contemplations based on the planets, I’m feeling a desire to shift towards just weekday contemplations less bound to a particular planet or energy. I am going to play some and see where that leads.

  • A Love Letter to Death

    A Love Letter to Death

    Dear Death,

    Last night I saw you embodied in the actress Aubrey Plaza as a character in a fun and surprisingly moving television series based on comic books. The morning before that, I saw you in a Tarot card I’d drawn for a friend, riding a fierce steed but holding a bony child in your arms with exquisite love and tenderness. The image surprised me, because that is how you appeared to me a few months ago when I spent a month contemplating you and your beingness in life. You presented in my imagination as a bone woman with swarming snakes for hair, holding your bone child to your ribs where your breast might be, and pointing.

    When you came to me then, I was not dying in body but in spirit, having had to confront patterns of being in life that were weighing me down and needed to be released. My approaches to work and caring for others were burning me out, and in need of transformation, and to make those changes confronted me with my own guilt and fear. And you were there, not so much doing anything, but simply witnessing me as I witnessed you, and in your presence those rigid expectations began to rot and fall away to become soil for new growth.

    What the comic book show really got right about you is how much witchcraft is about loving and befriending you, beautiful Death, and how that love awakens the vigor and fierce joy of being alive. To love you is not to surrender to nihilism, not to allow our most violent impulses to rule us. To love you is a balm to those aggressive urges that want to hold on to what was and avenge what is already hurt. When our fists, bloodied and bruised, still cling onto what poisons us, you enfold them in your soft palm and gently press until our fingers relax and open and let go of what no longer serves.

    It is normal to hate and fear you, because you take from us so many in untimely ways, people who deserved better or longer lives, but fairness and rules are not your concern. You simply are, and you show up when the time comes. Those of us who remain must remember you. Our lives depend upon you, because we feed upon other creatures who must die so we can live. And we cannot escape you, and we cannot know when you will take us, and that knowledge is bitter, and that bitterness makes the orange sweeter.

    Dear Death, I am sorry already that I know I will forget my love for you and your kindness, and I will fear you again, and I will hate you for what you take from me, and I am so grateful to know that these feelings do not touch you because you know exactly what you are. You are life. Through you new life comes. If you were not, I would not know how orange blends with pink and then dark blue during a sunset. I would not have felt the sweetness of a melting popsicle running down my fingers on a hot day. I would not have had so many joys and blessings that came because I finally surrendered to you and let go of that which weighed my spirit down.

    All my love.

  • Review – More Than Two, Second Edition: Cultivating Nonmonogamous Relationships with Kindness and Integrity, by Eve Rickert & Andrea Zanin

    Engaging in intentional nonmonogamy is like choosing to take an elective graduate degree in having relationships. “More Than Two” is the hefty book one would expect to be on the syllabus, a broad overview introducing various norms, ethics, joys and challenges of engaging in nonmonogamy. Those who are curious about or involved in polyamorous relationships, open relationships, or anything on the spectrum of doing nonmonogamy with the consent of their partners would find something insightful, valuable, and illuminating in this book.

    The authors affirm that nomonogamy is just another way of doing relationships, not necessarily more noble or evolved, but succeed in contrasting the nonmonogamous worldview with the expectations most of us were socialized to take for granted in a monogamous culture. They distill their approach to two ethical principles that are clear, simple, and yet offer a profound shift in perspective, such as: “The people in the relationship are more important than the relationship itself.”

    This edition comes out ten years after the original, enough time for the authors to have reflected on the strengths and unintended consequences of the framings of the last book. One apparent change in the second edition is the inclusion of a chapter very early in the book specifically about identifying abusive relationship dynamics, and particularly how those can manifest in polyamorous relationships. They specifically point out that this matters because relationship advice is only beneficial when in a non-abusive relationship, a point that I’ve rarely seen laid bare so succinctly. It has been a while since I read the original version, but my understanding is that the first edition laid greater emphasis on emotional self-responsibility in the face of relationship conflicts that put autonomy above all things, including our needs for attachment security. This second edition does a much better job balancing the dynamics of attachment and autonomy together, and in particular I love the chapter with illustrated descriptions of the flows of power and emotional intimacy in relationships, particularly highlighting the problems that arise when one person attempts to control the romantic connection of two others in their polycule.

    I also appreciate how the book frames relational issues from a non-blaming perspective. When two or more partners want different things, the problem is not one person’s wants but the mismatch of wants and needs in the relationship. When we can view it from this perspective, then we can work together to adjust the relationship to better accommodate those wants and needs.

    I do not expect folks who are uninterested in polyamory to pick up this book for fun, but I do think these discussions and dynamics are broadly applicable for all of us. Every human being engages in multiple relationships with people important to them and has to navigate conflicting demands. You may not be polyamorous, but you may have a spouse who cannot stand your father, or a demanding boss who considers the bottom line of your project more important than your emotional availability to your children. You may love your spouse more than anything but find you really need to spend one night out a month with your friend group. All of these are normal problems for us humans, and More Than Two offers an affirming, sensible framework of thinking to explore how to work through these issues for the good of all in the relationship.

  • Going private pay, politics, pickling and other reflections

    Going private pay, politics, pickling and other reflections

    On a personal level, the first quarter of this year was quite rocky. I’d restarted in-person sessions with a great deal of hope that it would help reinvigorate my practice, and it absolutely has. I deeply prefer in-person work to Telehealth. And in-person work meant spending a lot of up-front money to furnish a new office and pay the rent. That coincided with a significant surgery and then some sorrowful losses of pets at home. Not the biggest catastrophes in the world, but I felt heavier and more depleted than I would’ve liked, and I was also working harder to offset the money I’d spent.

    By the late spring, I was becoming aware that my business was not working as well as it could be. My revenue was not what I expected and needed it to be, though I was seeing more clients than I had been the previous year, and had raised my rates for 2024. Adding more clients was like a non-starter. I already felt my capacity was stretched thin. After work, I’d be drained most nights. My level of presence and attention in therapy suffered with the background stressors of money and holding space for so many clients. Parts of me grew impatient and frustrated with the therapeutic process, which is always an indicator that I need to make adjustments. 

    All of this has led to the decision to leave insurance panels and go private pay or out of network only. This writing is a reflection upon and explanation of that choice, along with my evolving perspective on therapy.

    The problems of insurance

    The only way to make more money doing therapy is to raise my rates, or find additional sources of income. But when it comes to insurance, you are only paid what they pay you. There is no raising of rates unless you are part of a larger group or corporation that can leverage your size to convince insurance to negotiate. When I have asked, I was denied and told there would be no negotiation.

    I find it unworkable to be a clinician with more than a decade of experience and more training and certification than when I started, getting paid the same reimbursement rate as my colleagues who are at the beginning of their careers. Everyone should get paid what they’re worth, of course, but my value as a clinician has increased while the reimbursement remains the same. Never getting anything beyond the occasional cost of living raise would be unsustainable at any other job.

    What some not in the field might not understand is how limited therapists are in accessing reimbursement for services. If I were a primary care physician and you came to see me, I could submit multiple codes for reimbursement. I would bill a code for the office visit, but also for the process of checking your heart, or giving you a vaccine, or drawing blood for a test. A fifteen to twenty minute session could include multiple billable procedures. But for psychotherapy, there is only one billable procedure, and the only variation is how long it is. You can bill for an intake session once, otherwise it’s for 55, 45, or 30 minute sessions. 

    Half my caseload has been in-network insurance, which pays about 60% of my rate. An hour of therapy costs me the same in time and energy whether I’m being paid my full rate or 60%. That means I cannot simply add more clients to make up the difference—there’s not the time in the day, nor the energetic capacity in my week. If my caseload were insurance-only, I would be unable to afford my own business, let alone living in Seattle. So it’s truly the private pay clients who subsidize the clients with insurance, and it no longer feels fair to continue to raise their burden of payment to offset those who are in-network.

    Martyrdom and resentment

    Making this choice brings up feelings of guilt and defensiveness, as evidenced by this long piece of writing. With clients, I set my own feelings aside to support them in however they process this news, because that is my job and a skill I’ve honed for years. I am glad to be of service. Outside of the therapy room, I find myself unexpectedly provoked. For the first time in a while let myself get into a dumb online argument with a stranger who said it was selfish and subjective for therapists to decide what their hour of time should be worth.

    As with many who get into this profession, my passion for caring and being of service comes with a willingness to compromise on my own well-being and then great guilt when I actually put my needs first. It is actually a slow process to recognize when my needs can no longer be set aside without cost to both myself and my clients, and the major indicators are when impatience and resentment begin to show up more consistently. I do not blame my clients for resentment or impatience; those feelings are about me and the boundaries that I need to set or protect. So if someone wants to tell me it’s selfish of me to set my own rates—that’s not a new thought I’ve never considered before. That’s a very ingrained story that has become harmful to my wellbeing that I’ve had to address in myself. 

    Earlier this summer, during some spiritual work, I got the message: “Sacrifice your ego on the altar of abundance.” Initially I mistrusted these words as evocative of the kind of materialistic manifestation culture that is so prevalent on social media. And it truly has been a sacrifice of ego to acknowledge my needs and boundaries, but instead it’s my ego story of being the self-sacrificing martyr who works hard and needs little in return. For most of my life, as a former Catholic, I’ve considered this a kind of holy way of being in the world, the way you’re supposed to be. Even having done a great deal of work on it, I’ve only made room within the story for some of my needs. This truly feels like putting that story on the altar.

    Resentment is the shadow twin of martyrdom. As much as my ego story was about how well I concealed my suffering behind stoic nobility, in truth I very much wanted people to see how much I suffered. Not so they’d relieve me of it. Instead so they could feel sorry for me and recognize how virtuous I was. Then I could have the compensatory comfort of self-righteousness, judging those who dared to prioritize their own needs and income. That movement only results in a heart closed by bitterness, resentment, and self-righteousness. That path does not lead to greater love. It is sacrificing that ego story, allowing myself to be a normal person with needs who is not supremely virtuous, that has renewed my heart and love in the therapy room and beyond.

    I do still provide free labor and volunteer service professionally and in other parts of my life. I offer mentorship to younger colleagues getting started in the work. I provide free letters of support for people seeking gender affirming care. I do volunteer work as a teacher and mentor in my spiritual community, and a substitute teacher for my aikido community. I believe in what therapy has to offer for mental and emotional wellness, but also it is only one component for a well person and a well society. These other parts of my life, being a partner and a member of communities, is also a huge component for the mental wellbeing of not just myself but all who participate in them. 

    Politicized therapy

    For the past several years of my professional life, I’ve publicly aligned with left-leaning groups of activists, writers, and therapists, particularly those who identify with offering “politicized” therapy. Along with this identification and belief in many left-wing principles has been an aversion to the idea of exploiting others financially and for their labor, which is one reason why I’ve avoided things like hiring employees, owning real estate, or taking this step of leaving insurance. Often I think of that lefty statement,“If it’s not accessible to the poor, then it’s neither radical nor revolutionary.” So this change is the outward expression of a larger change that has been happening within my sense of values, ideals, and principles.

    I am not saying that I am no longer aligned with left-wing values and ideas. What I have been asking myself lately, a lot, is: what actually works? I have been in many left-wing spaces of firebrands shouting their principles at each other and to my mind accomplishing very little in terms of building real community or effective collective action. I have seen amazing moments of cultural openness to new ideas be utterly reversed and erased with the passage of time. I have seen people I thought highly of seem to completely abandon their values when it came to their own self-interest. I have wrestled with the progressive neoliberal paradoxes of claiming to believe in certain left-wing ideals that are unworkable in this moment. 

    A better world is possible. And the burden of moral righteousness and purity complicates the choices that are necessary in the world that’s here right now. What I want most are groups who advocate the values of collective care and shared resources doing so in a way that is effective, that builds community, and leverages the power it has to make change. 

    When it comes to therapy, I have stepped back in some ways from my “brand” as a progressive, feminist therapist. Those values are absolutely still part of my work, but they are less explicit in practice. I feel less inclined to apply a label when we are telling a story that demonizes or misrepresents women or people of color, such as “This is white supremacist patriarchy.” What I do is notice, point out the demonization or misrepresentation, and invite us to be curious how that came to be the story. What function does this story serve in your system? How did this come to be in your psyche? How does it cause you or others harm? How does it separate you from connection?

    Sometimes the way we deploy political labels turns them into thought-terminating clichés. Everyone who comes into my therapy space knows that if you say something that is labeled patriarchal then it’s bad and you shouldn’t think it. But “knowing it’s bad and you shouldn’t think it” is not a therapeutically useful outcome. That is like trying to suppress an unwanted thought, which only makes it more charged and strongly fixed. People become so afraid to truly know themselves that they stop at the prescribed line and will go no further. If they sense there’s shame or judgment coming, they’re not going to open up. And a lot of us attach shame and judgment to those labels.

    These labels, of course, could also be catalysts that are healing or open up curiosity. For some in the dominant group, labeling a thought or action as coming from an oppressive bias invites reflection and exploration. If they’re in the targeted group, naming these actions as oppressive might be freeing and liberating, helping the individual to stop wasting energy trying to fix themself to solve a problem that isn’t theirs. You need to be able to have words for the things you’re discussing. 

    When the labeling does close down therapeutic opportunities, it becomes a barrier to the work of therapy and the work of liberation. We come into the therapy room to invite in curiosity and courage so that we can truly know, perceive, and accept ourselves. It is only those conditions that allow us to truly change—knowing, perception, and acceptance. When I understand this bias within me, there is a true opportunity to transform it. You need a space that is open and welcoming to parts of self that disagree with, fear, resist, or have completely different experiences to the values we want to hold. If they are not welcomed to be known, perceived, and accepted, they will never support our values.

    We want therapy to be a safe space for ourselves so we can be truly seen and loved, and we would love it if therapists for other people were psychological cops who sniff out dysfunction and abuse and get them under control. Other people are no different than you in this regard: if you don’t feel safe with, seen by, and accepted by your therapist, you’re not going to open up to them, and nothing therapeutic will happen. 

    Pickling and patience

    The last piece I want to name is that I love practicing with an Internal Family Systems approach, but in my impatience with therapy, I realized I was trying to IFS too hard. I was trying to teach clients how to IFS so we could do fidelity IFS. But clients don’t come to me to learn how to do IFS. They come because they need help exploring themselves. I was getting things backwards and unintentionally creating friction and moments when I missed people in our work. 

    I do not mean to put myself or my clients down, as we have also done profound and powerful work. But I have found it beneficial to let go of my attachment as to whether we “do” the IFS process in session or not. All I do is bring my presence and curiosity into the room and follow that, and follow the client where they want to go, and in that dance we may discover a part of self that is ready for work and the process. In truth, simply being present and curious without necessarily naming parts is still doing IFS.

    Part of the impatience I’ve named that surfaced this year came from not trusting the process and bringing in agendas that do not serve therapy or the client. This tension began with good intent during COVID. From 2020-2023, demand was so high, and suffering so great, that it became overwhelming. All that I loved about therapy—the spaciousness, the curiosity, the practice of love—began to feel like a luxury we couldn’t afford. I began to feel like we had to do triage, dealing with a few key issues and then making room for another client who needed urgent care.

    That urgency is counter-therapeutic and feeds those attitudes that I’ve named as a barrier to the work. And as the emergency energy began to relax, I had not the time or space to fully process and grieve how deeply I was impacted during that time. I kept plowing forward, trying to stave off burnout, and that urgency attached itself to the concerns about revenue, inflation, the cost of living, and whether I’d get to retire. Taking this step feels like it has restored agency to myself and freed me to return to the kind of therapy that I am good at, that works, that is not draining but quite joyful. It is a therapy that allows for slowness and surprises, and has no particular agenda yet paradoxically helps allow my clients to access the changes they have needed. 

    This past weekend, I spent time pickling a batch of cucumbers that will be ready in late October. By a strange coincidence, that will be the exact time when this change is complete and my insurance contracts will expire. Pickling is interesting because there is a very specific process to which one must humble themself, and part of that process is waiting. I won’t know how they turned out until the time comes when I open a jar and taste it. Perhaps it will be a bad harvest, or perhaps something delicious and exciting will emerge that I can enjoy and share for the winter and days to come.

  • Psychotherapeutic Access and the Contradictions of Progressive Neoliberalism

    Recently I saw comments in a discussion about therapists and insurance in which the commenter condemned therapists who go private pay for being financially inaccessible. Two of their statements stuck out. One was their statement that “you didn’t get into this career for the money.” The other is that healthcare is “supposed to be” free or low cost. These two statements embody the contradictions of Progressive Neoliberalism, and perhaps capitalism in general, that are frequently stated but rarely interrogated.

    Neoliberalism has been the decades-long governing philosophy to defund public services and depend upon private business to fill the gaps. Instead of having a national healthcare service that employs all health providers and pays us from taxes, we have this system of bureaucratic layers in which I as a private individual am providing the therapy and contracting with a private company who decides how much to pay me for my work on behalf of another private company that hired it to broker their employees’ healthcare needs. (That’s three layers of businesses that need to be paid, incidentally.)

    Progressivism is the movement to improve our conditions through reform and innovative technology and policy. It’s the idealism from which springs the statement that healthcare is supposed to be free. The contradiction that emerges when you put progressivism and neoliberalism together is saying healthcare should be free but having no infrastructure set up to pay for the labor and costs of that care. It is unworkable for a private individual to exist in that contradiction, providing cheap labor while trying to manage their own lives.

    This progressive-neoliberal contradiction extends to a lot of facets of life that we think “should” be public services. In Seattle, we say that housing is a human right, but housing is run by private individuals and companies. So the laws that we pass to protect renters do not come with any commensurate protections or supports for the landlords who are obligated to follow those laws even if it hurts their business. This has driven a number of smaller landlords to get out of the business or sell to larger corporations who can afford to absorb the cost of bad tenants or the costs of breaking laws to protect their bottom line. Perhaps inadvertently, these progressive policies end up strengthening large corporations.

    You can’t use capitalist methods to provide free or accessible public services. You need something like a co-op or government agency that is well-funded and exists to provide these services without the profit motive. The best private solution that I’m aware of is the Therapy Fund Foundation, a nonprofit that raises money to pay Black clinicians their market rate so that Black clients can access care at no cost to themselves. I’m happy this exists and I support it financially when I can, and I don’t know of any similar solutions that would include me as a white man. The Open Path Collective is a group of therapists committed to providing therapy at a deep sliding scale, which is another great option to expand access to low-income clients, but it requires the therapist to be willing and able to work far beneath their rate, which ends up coming back to this core problem.

    Therapists are supposed to provide a human right at accessible costs and I guess just shut the fuck up. But I can’t think of any other job or industry where you’d happily settle for not getting a raise beyond an occasional cost of living increase for the entirety of your career no matter how much you increase your skill. Being a therapist is my full-time job. My income comes from the client service I provide, and a couple royalties whose amounts afford me a couple extra beers a month. I pay for my own business costs, my own business taxes, my own housing, my own healthcare, my own food. I am also a human being who can only work so much in a week before the quality of my care degrades, and I want to do things like have vacations and enjoy the time I have on this earth with my loved ones. And I’m in a privileged position; many of my peers have student loans and kids on top of those costs. Were I to provide free or low-cost therapy, I would have to get a different full-time job so I could afford do therapy as a hobby on evenings or weekends.

    I can’t imagine other jobs where you would tell someone “well you didn’t get into this for the money” and think that is the end of the conversation. Actually, I can. I imagine teachers get this a lot, and people working in mission-driven nonprofits. Helping professions and nonprofits offer their own unique flavor of exploitation that’s wrapped in the language of passion. We’re told that simply doing this work is the privilege and we should be happy with the wages we’ve got. That we’re the selfish ones for wanting to be paid for all the energy and heart we expend. What’s the long-term product of that? Either burnt out martyrs or people who leave the profession and go into fields where they’re allowed to care about their paycheck. Neither of which results in good care.

    In summary, the Progressive-Neoliberal contradiction is the belief that public services should be accessible and free without advocating for government infrastructure set up to ensure it, instead placing the burden on private individuals and then blaming them for having human needs and limits. It’s wanting socialist outcomes using capitalist means, which in practice results in strengthening large corporations and squeezing out small businesses and individual providers. This does not improve access to quality therapy for clients in need of it.

  • Self-directed, community-minded.

    In a conversation this morning with a client we reflected on the kind of person who is self-directed but in a way that makes life harder for others—inconsiderate, making changes in community life without checking in with the people who would be affected, more focused on the part than the whole.

    It occurred to me that the problem is not being self-directed. That’s really helpful! I remember in my barista days I had folks on staff who really didn’t take any initiative unless I explicitly told him what needed to be done, even when there was a checklist for everyone to use to see what needs to be done. His request for support and direction might have been understandable if he hadn’t been there for a while, and if I didn’t have to stop and walk him through every task when I was already trying to stay ahead of the numerous things expected of us.

    I know many of us experience this frustration either at work or at home with partners who seem unable or unwilling to take responsibility for the tasks of the household and living. You want some self-direction here, you want them to be able to see for themselves what needs doing and to take the initiative to do it. It is exhausting to have to hold all of the expectations and follow through on them and hold someone’s hand and help them understand and follow through on the expectations.

    But the other side of this is being community-minded. Again, it’s clear that self-direction without community-mindedness is going to create as much irritation as no self-direction at all. Because when you’re operating in a shared space—a workplace, a community, a home you share with others—it serves you well to work the norms and the consensus.

    Any change you make that affects others involved, it behooves you to think proactively about who is impacted and make sure they understand and appreciate the change you’re trying to make. Otherwise, even if you have a great idea, the people who weren’t included are going to be unhappy and make your life a lot harder. On the other hand, if you really pay attention to what helps the community work and you do your piece without being asked, it makes everyone’s life easier and more joyful.

  • Don’t fall before you’re thrown.

    This week as a therapist has been a real throwback to the late 2016s and early 2017s when the political climate threw a lot of folks into an urgent need to see a therapist, and as a “politicized healer” I was one of many who invited these conversations.

    The right wing coined the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to make fun of liberals and lefties who they saw as overreacting to the presidency, and these days I feel like that’s as good of a name as any for how much he got under our skin, how much we became enflamed by his words and actions, the intensity with which we followed every word and every event. And there was so much drama! And so much lying! And a relentless barrage of things happening and being said that broke our social and democratic norms and kept many of us in a constant state of stress and outrage.

    I think there’s something to Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I think it was a product of a chaotic president and a media culture that profited off our nervous system dysregulation.

    This past month, I see that TDS beginning to take hold again, and hear some of my therapists who apparently must have started sometime after COVID wondering how to support clients with political anxiety, so I feel a collective bracing for impact among those in certain circles of ideology.

    If I seem glib or dismissive, I’m not, but after eight years I don’t think anyone wins when this kind of upset takes hold. To paraphrase Bruce Lee, in crisis we do not rise to our heroic imaginations, but sink to our familiar coping and survival strategies. I don’t blame anyone for surrendering to doom and cynicism—I spend far too much time there myself—but let’s take a breath.

    Studying martial arts is kind of an oracular experience, in which the teacher offers a correction of my technique that ends up hitting far too close to home. I am thoroughly called out. This morning, my sensei kept calling attention to my tendency to flinch in the face of an attack. In one moment that keeps lingering with me, he said, “Tony, don’t fall before you’re thrown.”

    On a practical level, it’s just annoying for your partner to fall before you’ve actually finished the technique, so it’s on us to stay with the throw as long as we can. Why that statement lingers with me today is the conversations I’ve been having this week about making plans in an uncertain future. One client is contemplating big, meaningful changes in life but wasn’t sure what to do if their worst fears came true in the country.

    But giving up on your goals and being the person you want to be before an election even happens is falling before you’re thrown. Making yourself small and starting to hide for fear of future targeting is falling before you’re thrown. It’s tempting, and it makes sense for wanting to survive, but whom does it serve? The other side of falling before you’re thrown is that the person throwing you might have bad technique. They might make a mistake that gives you an opportunity to turn the interaction around. You miss the opportunity if you give up before they’ve even won.

    I don’t know what will happen in the next four years, and I do not dismiss or belittle the fears many of us are bringing to this upcoming election. If your fears need attention and need you to take some reasonable precautions, that is a sound practice. What I’m inviting is for us to take our psyches and our power back from derangement and doom. If you’re afraid of being bullied, don’t do the bully’s work on their behalf. If you’re afraid of losing your joy, don’t throw your joy away. Don’t take in the dark voices that fill you with dread and powerlessness unless somehow that gives you liberty. Stay engaged as long as you can.

    Check out Slow Magic, my upcoming book on endurance and pursuing goals through hard times, available in February 2025 through Llewelyn and available for pre-order now.