Dear Therapist,
How the hell am I supposed to sit here and “focus on me” when the whole world is on fire? Every headline screams collapse. Every conversation with my clients, my kids, my friends, spirals into fear. And I’m supposed to come into your office and make my trauma the center of gravity? It feels selfish. It feels impossible.
And yet… ignoring it feels worse. Because the truth is, the world’s unraveling doesn’t erase my trauma, it stacks on top of it. It rips open the same fault lines that have been running through me since forever. 9/11 lives in me. COVID lives in me. Childhood trauma lives in me. Every new crisis slams right into that pile. My nervous system isn’t “maladaptive.” It’s overloaded by a world that won’t stop breaking.
Therapy tells me this is my time. My healing. My safe space. But how do I believe in safety when the ground is shaking beneath all of us? How do I take a breath when everything in me is bracing for the next impact?
And you, Therapist… What about you? I know you’re human. You’re not immune to this mess. You’re holding all of us while the same storms hit you. And somehow, I’m supposed to pretend you’re a blank slate who can absorb endless despair? That’s not real. That’s not human. That’s the myth of therapy… that it can hold apocalypse in a tidy 50-minute box.
I don’t know how to do this! I don’t know how to keep showing up and spilling my guts when the entire system we’re both drowning in pretends that survival is an “individual project.”
So here I am, writing to say… I’m terrified. I’m exhausted. I’m enraged. I’m grieving for people I’ll never meet and for the pieces of myself I’ve already lost. And if you’re looking for me to make it neat, manageable, palatable… I can’t. None of this is neat.
Signed,
A Client who refuses to pretend therapy alone can fix the end of the world
If this hits you in your gut… If you’re carrying both personal trauma and the collapse of a world that keeps piling it on… You’re not crazy. You’re not selfish. You’re not “too much.”
The problem isn’t you. It’s a system too small to hold the reality we’re living in.
If you’re ready to step outside that box and find healing that makes room for your rage, your terror, your despair, your plurality, your survival brilliance… Reach out. Let’s create something bigger than therapy’s tidy container. Something human. Something real.