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A person sees a serious car wreck on the highway, or is present when a stranger collapses, or watches violence unfold a few feet away that…
Everyone feels anxious. The harder question, and usually the first one a psychologist tries to answer, is when ordinary worry has tipped into something clinical. A…
A person drives to a family dinner already braced, replaying a decade of slights on the way, and spends the meal swallowing comments that would end…
The drink after work started as a way to put down a brutal day, and for a while it did exactly that. That is the part…
A tennis player who has hit ten thousand serves suddenly cannot find the toss, double-faults twice in a row, and feels her arm turn into something…
The thing that brings someone in is rarely the trauma itself. It is a marriage that suddenly feels suffocating, a new baby who triggers waves of…
The discovery is often the easy part to describe: a message read over a shoulder, a lie that unravels, a friend who turns out to have…
Months after a collision that left no lasting physical injury, a person still cannot merge onto the connector without their hands tightening on the wheel and…
The group chat keeps going without them. The weekend plans get made and they hear about it after. Maybe a friend group slowly closed ranks, or…
The invitation arrives weeks out, and the dread starts immediately, long before the event itself. A work function, a child’s recital, a wedding, a crowded festival.…
The clearest sign is often physical before it is anything else. A person notices their jaw is tight by mid-morning, that they brace at the sound…
Someone returns to work a few days after a miscarriage and a colleague, meaning well, says “at least it was early.” The comment lands like a…
Couples rarely arrive in a therapist’s office over the argument they name. They arrive over the way that argument keeps happening, the same painful sequence playing…
A team meeting where six people will eventually look your way. A workshop that opens with everyone introducing themselves around a circle. A dinner party where…
A friend texts to check in, and the phone sits face-down on the couch while the person who could answer it stares at the ceiling, fully…
Someone signs up for a class, then quietly lets the start date pass. They draft an application and never hit send. From the outside this can…
The browser fills with open tabs by midnight. One is a salary comparison, another a forum thread about an industry that might be dying, a third…
What makes conflict at work uniquely wearing is that you cannot walk away from it. A falling-out with a friend can be given space; a tense…
The decision was made months or years ago, and still the mind returns to it nightly. They ended the marriage, or they did not. They took…
Someone meets a kind, steady new partner and finds themselves picking fights anyway, scanning texts for hidden meaning, pulling back the moment things start to feel…
Someone is standing in line at a coffee shop on an unremarkable morning when their heart lurches, their vision tightens, and a wave of certainty arrives…
Things are going well, which is precisely the problem. A relationship reaches the point where the next step would be obvious to most people, a shared…
Grief becomes complex less because of how much a person loved and more because of what surrounds the loss. A death by suicide leaves different wreckage…
An ordinary disagreement at dinner ends with one person in tears and the other slamming a door, and an hour later neither can quite explain how…
A person turns down a promotion that would mean leading meetings, orders the same safe dish so they never have to send anything back, and rehearses…