On therapy, motherhood, and the weight of abbreviated hope.
I've been a bit quiet on my corner of the internet lately. And not because I don't have anything to say. Girl, trust me, I've got opinions aplenty.
I've talked about sexual assault more in the past month than I have in over a decade of practice. We've explored the what-if scenarios until we have almost convinced ourselves that we have the tiniest bit of control. There's the weight of what clients are carrying into my office and the weight of what I'm carrying outside of it.
The abbreviated hope of it all, where for just one second you let yourself believe that maybe, just maybe, everything is about to turn out for the best—only to have the wind knocked out of you as soon as you see the next asinine plan to address something that wasn't even a problem in the first place. You catch your breath for a second, believe in the hope of it all as the sunshine hits your face, and then watch grown men pile onto an amazing human on the internet because she dared to call out a comedian for saying some shit that wasn't funny.
Everything just feels so loud and so fucking heavy. I haven't wanted to add to the noise, and I've been unsure if I even should when I have nothing novel to offer up.
But I keep coming back to this story.
In 2016, I was working as a therapist in an adolescent intensive outpatient program. I LOVED that job. I built that curriculum brick by brick, and I was so proud of the work we were doing and the felt safety that we were providing to those kids.
The morning following the election, we had clinical rounds, a time when the whole team got together to discuss each kiddo and make plans for their care. It was definitely not the place where I was supposed to, fueled by minimal sleep and unchecked despair, aggressively call out my co-facilitator for her rigidity by proclaiming that if she couldn't be bothered with going off script to allow the kids to process their feelings about the election, "I don't want you in that room tonight."
There was something about that particular group of kids in November 2016.
Queer kids. Trans kids. Kids who had spent much of their lives being told, in one way or another, that who they were was a problem to be solved.
We had a plan for the group that day, one I had carefully crafted with the best intentions. A curriculum. Clinical objectives. All the things we were supposed to accomplish.
But those kids had been talking about the what-ifs surrounding the election for weeks, and not a single one of them was old enough to vote.
They needed a space to feel their feelings, not a lesson on cognitive distortions. They needed the adults in the room to honestly answer them when they asked how this was going to impact their futures. They needed someone to hold space for the powerlessness they felt without trying to fix it. They needed us to be quiet long enough to actually hear their pain and their fear and their worries.
Was my approach to addressing my concerns about my co-facilitator particularly professional? Absolutely not. It remains the only time I've ever been reprimanded for my behavior at a job.
I had to talk to my supervisor about it twice, and both times I acknowledged that my delivery could have been better. But I wasn't sorry for allowing reality to shape our discussion about distress tolerance and taking care of each other in the face of the unknown. And I wasn't sorry for insisting that the adults who were supposed to be supporting those kids needed to be willing to sit with some discomfort themselves.
Those kids are adults now, in their twenties. Some might have families. Some might be navigating careers, relationships, their own mental health, and questions about their futures. I still think about those kids sometimes when I hear a song or use a metaphor that they definitely would have judged.
I hope they're all okay.
Sometimes the worst part about being a therapist is that I don't know how everyone's story rounds out. But I do know that I will never regret making room for their voices. I'd do it again tomorrow if I had to.
After all these years, what has stuck with me isn't the reprimand. It's how ridiculous it would have been to spend 180 minutes teaching those kids to challenge their thoughts when the things they were afraid of weren't cognitive distortions. They were real questions about the world they were going to have to live in.
And honestly, a lot of their fears have materialized, at minimum in veiled threats and increasing uncertainty.
They weren't asking us to predict the future. They were asking us to take their fears seriously.
Ten years later, the clients who sit on my couch look a little different, but I still find myself having versions of these same conversations. These days my clients aren't misunderstood adolescents who sort of hate to like me. They're women navigating infertility, pregnancy loss, reproductive decisions, and the impossibly complicated experience that is modern motherhood.
But the what-ifs? The fear? The desperate attempts to find some tiny sliver of control in circumstances that feel entirely outside of their control?
Yeah, those feel pretty familiar.
And hear me, I believe in coping skills. I believe in teaching and modeling distress tolerance. I have spent a lot of money and time investing in training to make sure I have a whole Santa-size bag full of those to offer clients.
But I also believe that we cannot keep asking people to learn how to cope with their circumstances without acknowledging that sometimes their circumstances are the fucking problem.
Therapy is political. It always has been.
The people sitting across from me don't exist in a vacuum, and I'm not particularly interested in pretending that they do just because acknowledging reality might make Brad uncomfortable.
I'm not interested in telling my clients who to vote for. I respect their autonomy and independence too much for that. I'm not interested in making my therapy office a place where you have to agree with me to feel safe. In fact, some of my best work manifests when we disagree with each other and have to sit with that.
I've also never bought into the idea that being a good therapist means being a blank slate. I'm a whole ass human being in that room, with my own experiences, values, and convictions. Those aren't my clients' responsibility to carry, and they certainly aren't required to share them. But I can hold professional boundaries and have personal convictions. Turns out, those things aren't mutually exclusive.
Because that's the thing about doing this work: it changes you, too. The people I've sat with, the stories I've been trusted with, the things I've witnessed over the years? They don't just disappear when I close my office door.
And the things happening outside of my office don't magically stop impacting people when they walk through the door.
And sometimes (dare I say, oftentimes) what the women sitting across from me need isn't another coping skill. It's someone willing to acknowledge that their fear makes sense. That the uncertainty is real. That their rage is allowed to exist without needing to be reframed into something a little more palatable to the masses.
And motherhood? Well, motherhood has radicalized me to my bones.
Not because becoming a mother suddenly made me care about other people's kids. I'd been sitting with other people's kids long before I had my own. But motherhood has made it pretty impossible to ignore the enormous gap between how much we claim to value mothers and families and how little we're actually willing to do to support them.
I spend my days with women who are doing everything they can to become mothers. Women grieving the pregnancies and futures they imagined. Women who love their children more than anything and are still drowning under the weight of the mental load, impossible expectations, and a society that seems to believe mothers should be endlessly grateful for the privilege of doing it all.
And then we have the audacity to call their exhaustion a personal failure. As though another bubble bath, gratitude journal, or deep breathing exercise could compensate for unaffordable childcare, inadequate parental leave, inaccessible healthcare, and a world where people who have never met you feel entitled to make decisions about your body and your family.
We love to celebrate the sacrifices mothers make. But nobody seems all that interested in figuring out why we're requiring them to make so many sacrifices in the first place.
And I'm raising my own kids in the middle of all of it. Kids who I love with biological ferocity, who I want to protect from every terrible thing this world might throw their way.
But loving my own children fiercely doesn't give me permission to stop caring about everyone else's.
I don't want to raise kids who only know how to advocate for themselves. I want to raise kids who understand that caring about people means giving a shit about what happens to them, even when their lives look nothing like ours. Even when the decisions being made won't affect us personally.
Because motherhood isn't just political when the decisions being made affect my kids. It's political when we're deciding whose families deserve support, whose reproductive decisions deserve respect, and which children get to grow up feeling safe and wanted in the world.
And I wish I could wrap this whole thing up with some beautiful sentiment about hope. That despite everything, I know it's all going to work out. That the kids are going to be alright.
But I don't know that. And frankly, some days I'm struggling to find that hope myself.
I'm not interested in manufacturing hope just to make the discomfort more palatable. I'm interested in doing what I can with the responsibility I have.
I vote angry. This year, I'm voting fucking furious. Furious about the things we're expected to accept as normal. Furious about how often the people with the least power are left carrying the consequences of decisions they never got to make.
But I vote with hope, too. Not because I believe everything is going to work out, but because I refuse to accept that this is the best we can do.
And when I walk into a voting booth, I'm carrying a whole lot more than my own opinions.
Usually, I'm literally bringing my own kids with me, answering their questions about who I'm voting for and why (often to the amusement of those waiting in line with us). I'm carrying the stories of women who have trusted me with some of the hardest parts of theirs. Women trying desperately to build families. Women whose reproductive choices have been limited by decisions they had no part in making. Women trying to raise children in a world that keeps asking them to do more with less.
And I'm carrying those kids from 2016.
The kids who were old enough to understand how much an election could change their lives, but not old enough to have a say in the outcome.
I was.
I don't know where all of those kids ended up. I don't know how many of them remember what we talked about that November, or the curriculum I threw out the window.
But I remember them.
