What Kind of Support Do You Need?
Therapy can be many things—practical, spiritual, emotional, directive, gentle, fierce.
But what kind of support do you need most?
Here are a few forms of support that therapy can offer:
✨ Advice & Guidance
- You want a clearer path or direction
- You appreciate tools, frameworks, or insights
- You’re looking for help sorting through options or next steps
- You want your therapist to weigh in—not just reflect back
🌿 Safety & Comfort
- You want a calm, grounding presence
- You need space to process without pressure or fixing
- You’re seeking warmth, trust, and emotional refuge
- You want to feel held, not pushed
🔍 Honesty & Transparency
- You want a therapist who will be real with you
- You appreciate being gently called out or challenged
- You’re curious about your patterns—and ready to name them
- You don’t want sugar-coating; you want truth
💛 Empathy & Compassion
- You want to feel deeply understood
- You’re craving emotional resonance, not just analysis
- You’re not looking for quick fixes—you want someone to be with you in it
- You value presence more than performance
🔥 Encouragement & Empowerment
- You want someone who believes in your potential
- You’re ready to be stretched and supported
- You’re looking for accountability as much as affirmation
- You want to feel energized, not just safe
So, what kind of support do you need?
It might shift over time. It might be a mix.
Therapy can be many things.
What do you need right now?
📷: Tippi Hedren, 1962 by Philippe Halsman
Freeze State
The overwhelm we feel is the point, a political strategy to overload people with so much alarming information and sudden changes that our ability to process is compromised.
Being emotionally flooded can cause a stress response that triggers fight or flight - or perhaps one of the lesser known survival responses - to fawn or freeze.
My default is freeze. In an acute moment, I go numb, mind blank, I don’t know, I don’t care. I stare at a spot on the floor.
Living in an ongoing freeze state, which I’m in now, is disorienting. I want to tune out, shut down, remain helpless. But I’m also operating in constant low level panic. Small stressors - someone not texting me back - can build in scale. Resources are low, irritability peaks. Relational disputes flare.
Since the LA fires and the inauguration, it has been one thing after the next, and I have been unable to regulate my nervous system. In states like this, for me, the answer is always the same: sound & body.
I need sustained periods of NO sound. Music & podcasts off, driving or cooking in silence. Without the din of distraction. This helps me get under the layer of noise and calms me down. Being in nature is nice, but can’t always get there.
When I’m sleeping, I listen to binaural beats - meditations that play music to bring your brainwave patterns into specific frequencies, such as the delta waves, known for deep sleep and healing (I love the app Brainwaves).
I need physical movement. Exercise and walking, yes. I get weekly hands-on somatic therapy to physically release the trauma that is stored and stagnant in my body.
And my latest hook - fad warning - is this vibration machine (pretty cheap on Amazon) that shakes my body for 10 minutes. Shaking activates vagal tone, which is the calming part of the nervous system that helps regulate heart rate and promote relaxation.Shaking can help the body reprocess trauma in a way that allows the nervous system to discharge the trapped energy, rather than holding it in.
What each of us needs is unique, so these are just some ideas.What are the ways you guys are supporting yourselves?
Art by Willem den Browser
What's The Most Liberating Thought You've Ever Had?
★ MY ANSWERS:
COGNITIVE
"This is the way it is. For right now. And it will change.”
"I don't need to know the answers."
"I don’t know, and can’t possibly know, what’s going to happen in the future."
"Change is good."
"I'm ok."
“Thoughts are real, but they’re not true.”
“Knowing WHY is not important.”
BUDDHIST
“Joy is not controlling.”
"Most of my own suffering is caused by me. That means I can change it.”
“Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” (Tara Brach)
“Life is a continual succession of agreeable & disagreeable situations.”
"I have my most powerful toolkit with me at all times - my breath, my body, and the present moment."
“Sense what it means to be in the center of now.”
TAOIST
“A warm spring wind steadily dissolves winter ice.”
"A wind that changes direction often, even a very powerful one, will disperse nothing - it only stirs up the sky. The wind that causes real change is the one that blows consistently in the same direction.”
“In a great storm, the wise bird returns to her nest and waits patiently.”
LAW OF ATTRACTION
"When I'm working too hard / pushing for things to be a certain way, I let go of the wheel and let the easier way show itself."
"When things don't fall into place with ease, it's a sign to me that maybe I should reconsider what I'm pushing for."
"It's important for me to notice if I feel drained after being with someone."
★ What are yours??
Prompt by Rob Brezsny
Image by Benjamin Everett
The Negativity Bias in Our Brains
NEGATIVITY BIAS: To survive and pass on their genes, our ancestors needed to be especially aware of dangers, threats, and conflicts. Consequently, the brain evolved a negativity bias that looks for bad news, reacts intensely to it, and quickly stores the experience in our neural structure.
See, it's not just you with those negative voices in your head. We all have brains with a hair-trigger readiness to go negative to help us survive.
We can still be happy, but this bias creates an ongoing vulnerability to stress, anxiety, disappointment, and hurt.
The remedy is to foster simple, positive experiences — and to really take them in so they become a permanent part of us.
Watching a sunset? Dog lying at your feet? Parking meter up and you didn't get a ticket?
Open to the positive feelings and try to sense them in your body; let them fill your mind. Enjoy them. As if you were a sponge, absorb the experience as much as you can. Soak it into your bones, into your nerves, into your heart, your organs.
This is how we begin to change the wiring in our brains.
Ideas by Rick Hanson
Photo by Jim Mangan
Stuck in The Past?
Do you get stuck in the past? Want to let go of obsessive thoughts?
First, what are you telling yourself about the situation? What are you believing about yourself or others?
What's the hurt or pain under the thinking? Can you allow it to surface? Try doing this alone, maybe in your room or with a journal.
Learn to self-soothe: Put your hand on your heart - this releases oxytocin, the "feel good" hormone, which is activated when we cuddle or hug a loved one. You'll feel an immediate relaxing of your body and nervous system.
Comfort yourself, silently or in a whisper: "I'm here with you." This may be foreign to you, but try. "This is hard. I see you. You're not alone."
Be easy with yourself. You're trying something new. This is how you learn to be with difficult emotions without checking out or shutting down. You'll see that when you do this, the sadness or pain comes up and then it passes. You now have tools to use in the moment so the emotions won't overwhelm you.
We see you and you're not alone!
