The Therapists Are Feeling It, Too

As a therapist, Jamie Williamson is trained to handle other people’s big emotions. In session with clients every week in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Williamson has to set boundaries, stay present, and protect their own emotional well-being. “We’re this container that [people] can pour all their emotions into,” says Williamson, 28. “We’re left with the container afterward, but we know how to deal with it.”

Lately, though, the dynamic has gotten trickier. Before the 2024 election, politics only came up occasionally in Williamson’s sessions. Now, all of their clients — roughly 70% of whom are LGBTQ+ — have politics on the brain. “Every single client I see is scared and not sure what to do,” says Williamson, who is trans. “That is so heavy, to have every single person be in the same spot.”

Since the pandemic, Americans’ use of mental-health services like therapy has increased significantly — by 39% from 2020 to 2022, according to one study. There are reasons to believe that trend will continue; the day after the November election, Zocdoc saw a 22% jump in mental-health bookings in just two hours.

Therapists are on the front lines of this change: real, human people scrolling past the same apocalyptic headlines as the rest of us. How are they managing their clients’ uncertainties alongside their own? “A lot of screaming music on the way home,” Williamson says. “I have a 30-minute commute. I just put on really loud music, and that’s my way of processing the day: screaming along, sometimes crying. Mostly that.”

In even the most serene of times, there are several schools of thought on how much therapists should disclose about themselves. Most of those camps agree that the work requires a delicate balance: forming an authentic connection with someone while being careful not to take up too much of their dedicated space with your own ideas and experiences. Traditionally, it’s best practice to keep personal beliefs and information about one’s own well-being out of sessions with a client. Though the election didn’t change that, exactly, the era America has since entered is shifting how some therapists think about their work. “[This moment] is highlighting how the personal is political, and how political realities deeply impact our day-to-day living,” says Silvia Dutchevici, founder and president of the Critical Therapy Institute in New York.

A psychotherapist for more than 20 years who also supervises clinicians, Dutchevici believes therapists should be “hypervigilant” right now: When patients bring up familiar political anxieties in session, it may be more likely that therapists’ own issues will surface. “It’s always been important that therapists self-analyze, receive supervision, or return to therapy to process their own feelings,” she says. “We have to find ways to make sure that, as providers of mental-health services, we get the help we need.”

As a queer and trans person, Ren Workman, an outpatient therapist in Gloucester, Massachusetts, says the political attacks on trans people coming from the Trump administration are always on their mind. Like Williamson’s, most of Workman’s clients are LGBTQ+ teens and young adults. Guiding clients through mindfulness practices — acknowledging thoughts as they come, without judgment — reminds them to honor their own feelings, too. “I’m someone who has been taught to keep a lot in,” says Workman, 27. “To see clients come in and be so angry and devastated and sad at the state of the world sometimes gives me permission to feel that too.”

For other therapists, it feels crucial to hold stronger boundaries at work. Shaquanda Brown, a school adjustment counselor, supports elementary-aged kids and their families in Reading, Massachusetts. In the years since the pandemic, she says, “a lot of people are realizing that the children are not OK,” something she suspects has to do in part with kids observing their politically anxious parents at home. Kids as young as 5 are afraid to go to school, but they can’t articulate why.

As a Black woman, Brown says, she’s tired of being asked by white friends and colleagues to participate in public post-election grieving. She sees the impact of the election in her work every day and knows that it doesn’t serve her to wallow. She’s protecting her peace — and making sure she can continue supporting her students — by keeping strict limits between work and everything else. “[I’m] able to compartmentalize,” says Brown, 31. “I enter the school parking lot, and all the thoughts I thought just disappear. Until I get back in the car, and then everything that’s happened in this building in the past six hours disappears.”

Therapists have noticed other ways current events crop up in session, some of them subtle and some more overwhelming. Ann*, a therapist working in San Diego, says the recent Los Angeles fires have been top of mind for many of her clients. Signs of spring that would ease symptoms of seasonal affective disorder — warmer days, plants in bloom — now make climate anxiety worse. “There are fears, anger, and other manifestations of grief over what [they] imagine the future may be like,” says Ann, 30.

What’s changed about her approach in response? Having previously worked in hospice care, Ann is bringing some of its principles into her current practice. “[Hospice care] comes down to redefining what hope means in situations that are exceptionally dire,” she says. “How do we find connection, meaning, peace, and dignity, even when things are all but guaranteed to become painful and, in some situations, horrific?”

For Elizabeth*, a child and adolescent psychologist in Cincinnati, her school-age and teen clients are afraid immigration policies will hurt their families. Watching their parents under so much stress, younger and younger kids are expressing suicidal ideation. It’s Elizabeth’s job to sit with them in their hardest feelings, she says — even if, like Brown, she has to compartmentalize them. “I can’t just turn on, become a robot, and disconnect from reality. I have to experience what they’re experiencing,” she says. “That can be increasingly difficult to do when there’s so much happening at once.” To cool off, she listens to audiobooks or calls a friend on the commute home from work. When clients start appearing in her dreams, she knows it’s time to take a day off.

Elizabeth has shifted some aspects of her therapeutic approach to meet the moment. For example, she’s leaning less on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy — targeting unhelpful thinking patterns and the behaviors that follow — in an effort not to “pathologize” ambient anxiety but instead acknowledge it as a normal response to the times. “We’re living in a time [when] to feel anxious and overwhelmed and sad … is a sign that you’re alive and paying attention,” she says.

Therapy won’t fix politically induced existential dread, and it’s not supposed to. As Workman says, it’s challenging, personal work for everyone involved, but it’s your therapist’s job to know how to handle it. “I don’t think clients should be worrying about their therapist,” says Workman. “I finish every day being so utterly exhausted and also feeling like, ‘Yeah, I'm glad that’s how I spent my day.’”

*Names have been changed.