Only investors are aware of a specific type of 2am. The house is quiet and the room is dark, but the mind is working on spreadsheets, replaying the day’s figures, picturing the opening bell for tomorrow, and questioning whether the 3 p.m. decision was made out of panic or reason. On the bedside table is the phone. There is a nearly physical temptation to check. This is not a specialized experience. It is incredibly common in the months after severe market downturns, and people sitting on the other side of therapy sessions in the UK hear versions of it practically…
Author: Jack Ward
Some couples begin to have the conversations they have been discreetly avoiding for months at some point, usually between the engagement party and the venue deposit. Cash. Kids. Christmas is given to whose family? What happens if one of you wants to relocate, loses a job, or just doesn’t feel like the person the other one married? These are not romantic discussions. They are essential ones. Additionally, more and more couples are having them without waiting for a crisis. Instead, they are scheduling a therapist. Premarital counseling has lost much of its institutional framing in recent years. Previously, it was…
There is a particular kind of dread that settles in quietly. It does not announce itself the way a panic attack does. It arrives in the middle of a supermarket when someone stands in front of the heating oil section and does a mental calculation they already know the answer to. It shows up at 2am, staring at a ceiling, running through numbers that refuse to add up. And increasingly, it ends up in a therapist’s consulting room — expressed not in the language of war or geopolitics, but in the more intimate vocabulary of exhaustion, helplessness, and a sense…
Before a significant storm arrives, a certain silence descends upon Donner Pass. There is less traffic. The sky takes on the hue of worn pewter. Without being asked, truck drivers slow down. Then, as if the mountain has been waiting to make a point, the snow begins to fall—not slowly or gradually, but all at once. This past weekend in the Sierra Nevada started pretty much like that, and by Saturday morning, the point had been made quite forcefully. For the West Slope of the Northern Sierra Nevada and Western Plumas County, the National Weather Service upgraded an earlier Winter…
The email arrived in Nina Froes’ inbox on a Friday afternoon while she was in the middle of an asylum hearing. She silently signed off after pausing the virtual session and telling the attorneys on both sides that she needed to leave. The hearing had concluded. Her career as an immigration judge was equally successful. In what is quickly turning into one of the more depressing episodes of the second Trump administration, she was fired along with five other colleagues, including Judge Roopal Patel in Boston. Along with four other judges, Roopal Patel and Nina Froes were fired on Friday.…
Some people find a certain type of stillness to be nearly intolerable. It’s the stillness of waiting rather than the stillness of peace. It’s a good relationship. For the first time in years, there isn’t a financial crisis. The health test results were negative. However, there is a low hum of dread somewhere in the chest, just beneath the typical rhythm of a Tuesday afternoon. There’s going to be something. There must be an impending event. It always does. As a philosophy, this is not pessimism. It’s more than that; it’s a nervous system that has been trained over an…
A woman sits on the edge of her new bed in her new city and feels, for some reason, like crying in the middle of what should have been a very good week—the job offer accepted, the apartment finally secured, the long-distance relationship closing its gap. Not because there’s a problem. Because there is something seriously wrong that cannot be explained. She is aware of the situation’s logic. She made the correct decisions. The results are precisely what she had anticipated. However, the sensation in her chest is unrelated to any of that. This is one of the most confusing…
The Effects of Living Without Emotional Language on Emotions Around the world, therapy offices engage in a specific type of conversation that goes something like this. “How did that make you feel?” queries the therapist. After a brief period of silence, the intelligent, articulate, and frequently successful professional person seated across from them says, “I don’t know.” This isn’t meant to be a diversion. Not by avoiding it. They just have no idea. There is a sense that something is going on inside, but it has no name, no form, and no way out. It resides in the chest like…