6 Therapy Trends to Watch in 2026

For therapists, being attuned to the present moment isn’t just a powerful technique we teach clients, it’s how we listen, respond, and support change.

But being present doesn’t mean we ignore the future. In fact, keeping a finger on the pulse of what’s happening now helps us anticipate the future, particularly when it comes to the forces shaping our clients’ lives. None of us has a crystal ball, but looking ahead isn’t about prediction, it’s about preparation and care.

What might 2026 hold? To find out, we sat down with some of the field’s wisest leaders who are closely engaged with the changing landscape of psychotherapy—Linda Thai, Justin Garcia, Sahaj Kaur Kohli, Matthias Barker, Julie Menanno, and Chinwé Williams. We hope their thoughts will serve as gentle guideposts to help you stay informed, reflective, and inspired over the coming year.

LINDA THAI on the Return to Community Healing

We often think of personal transformation as a solitary venture. But an untapped wellspring of healing, says clinician Linda Thai, actually comes from surrounding ourselves with other people. As a storyteller, educator, trauma specialist, and yoga practitioner, the relational aspect of therapy is a cornerstone of Thai’s approach, something she’s brought to her work with the Trauma Research Foundation and the Asian Mental Health Collective, and highlighted in keynotes for the U.K.’s Royal Society of Medicine, the National Education Association, and many others. Over the coming year, she believes more clients—and therapists, too—will be seeking out community, trading conventional therapy in traditional office settings for something more interpersonal, spiritual, and elemental.

“Something I’ve really been pondering and feeling into is how more people are looking for groups, experiential workshops, and retreats,” she says. “I think a lot of people have outgrown traditional therapy. They’ve seen the limitations of it and want more. They want something deeper.”

Why? Thai believes clients have an innate desire to be seen, heard, and known—“and this is a function of communities,” she says. “When your first experience of a group, which is family of origin, has been suboptimal, then you’re always living at the edge of the group, or leaving the group—and that’s something that can only be repaired by a group.” A group can take many forms, Thai says, whether it’s a drumming group, a walking group, or a tai chi group that meets at a park on the weekends.

Thai says she’s seeing more therapists offer these kinds of experiences—and is facilitating them herself. What began as a deep appreciation for other people’s groups (“I learn from role-modeling and being on the receiving end of an experience,” she says) inspired her to begin hosting meditation and yoga groups, and eventually, multiday residential workshops, like meetups where participants camp, or simply mingle at a bed and breakfast.

“These people aren’t just coming for me,” she says. “What they want is to connect with like-minded people. My clients tell me they want to meet more people. They want to find their people.”

But these groups are more than just a chance to socialize, Thai says. They’re “a larger container to hold the stuff that’s too much for one person to carry.” They’re not only healing on a deep bodily level, she adds, but joining together is a spiritual act that helps participants reconnect with their most authentic selves and better understand their place in the world.

“We’re rehabilitating our social engagement systems to be something that’s a bigger part of ourselves,” she says, “There’s a communal heartbeat that emerges in groups, a settling of the body armoring.” Then, she says, play emerges. “A byproduct of doing the work together is that we’ll laugh and be ridiculously absurd with each other. We actually experience pleasure.”

It’s not just therapy clients who attend these workshops, Thai says. Therapists are seeking them out too. “As therapists, we tend to become so absorbed in our work that we overlook other aspects of what it means to be a human mammal,” Thai says. “Now, more of us are realizing how important this is, for ourselves and for the world.”

Thai hopes more therapists will give group work a try. Chances are there are some in your own backyard, she says, “where people get together to bake cakes, or to learn how to do things together.” And if you’d like to create a group of your own, start there too. After all, the best teacher, she says, is experience.

Will 2026 be the year of community healing? Thai thinks so. “There’s a deep rumbling I can feel amongst people,” she says. “They’re done with polarization and want to be with others. They want to rehabilitate the innate desire to be part of something bigger than themselves.”

JUSTIN GARCIA on Demystifying the “Sex Recession”

Think you didn’t have enough sex in 2025? Want to have more sex in 2026? You’re not alone, says Justin Garcia, the executive director of the Kinsey Institute and an award-winning sex researcher, educator, and author of the newly released book The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Live and Die for Love. Across America and overseas, Garcia says people from nearly every demographic are talking about the so-called “sex recession”—and as the myths surrounding it continue to grow in 2026, therapists will have a critical role to play.

“It’s easy to get lost in the noise of what we mean by a ‘sex recession,’” Garcia says. “The data show patterns of reduced sexual frequency again and again. So what’s going on? And is it actually a problem?” Not necessarily, he argues. Just because people are having sex less often doesn’t mean that sexual satisfaction and quality are dropping too.

“So many people are concerned about or worried about not having ‘enough’ sex,” he explains. “They’ll ask questions like, ‘Does this mean my marriage is falling apart?’ Therapists are uniquely situated to help them understand that sex isn’t always a gauge for a relationship’s quality.” Yes, sex is important for relationships—in fact, Garcia says sexual problems are one of the strongest predictors of divorce in almost every metanalysis on marriage that’s ever been done—but it’s not simply a matter of how often.

“Therapists can help people understand the meaning they attribute to sexual activity in their relationships,” Garcia explains. “The question we need to be asking isn’t whether someone’s having more or less sex, it’s whether they’re having the kind of sex they want. Are they having sex that’s meaningful for them in some way? Is it about their relationship? Or pleasure? Maybe it’s just casual sex. Whatever the particulars are, we need to help people understand their goals behind sex before focusing too much on frequency.”

Garcia adds that all therapists, not just sex therapists, should be thinking about the role of sex in their clients’ lives and the myths and worries they’re attaching to it. Some of these worries are based on legitimate fears about sexual health. After all, Garcia says, “We’re seeing a rise in antibiotic-resistant STIs. And because of federal cuts to USAID, all indications suggest we’re going to start seeing spikes of HIV and AIDS. Then, there’s the impact of overturning Roe v. Wade. Our research team has some of the first data that show how this is impacting willingness to have sex with a new partner. It’s taking longer, and people—especially young women—are becoming more cautious.” But herein lies an opportunity, Garcia says.

“Therapists can help people unpack and weather these challenges,” he explains. “My old friend Ruth Westheimer—Dr. Ruth—used to talk about sexual literacy. We need more knowledge and less salacious mythology around sex. One of our core principles at the Kinsey Institute is to honor sex as a dynamic component of people’s lives—as a critical feature of relationships, a behavior that leads to reproduction, and something that drives relationship maintenance. So my hope in 2026 is that we can take sex out of the salacious and honor it instead.”

SAHAJ KAUR KOHLI on AI in Our Consulting Rooms

Artificial intelligence is many things to many people: it’s benign, disastrous, or the best thing since sliced bread. But however you feel about AI, therapist Sahaj Kaur Kohli says it’s time to face the facts: there’s a good chance your clients are using it to supplement their treatment. Kaur Kohli, the award-winning founder of Brown Girl Therapy, Washington Post advice columnist, author, and creator of the upcoming online therapist community hub The Bicultural Brief, predicts that not only will more therapists be hearing about how their clients are using AI in the coming year—“Hey ChatGPT, here are my symptoms, do I have OCD?”—but that this trend could change the way you operate from the very first session.

“I think therapists will be grappling with what it means to provide care in a world where AI is part of the client’s emotional and relational ecosystem,” Kaur Kohli explains. “I’m already seeing clients who are using AI to process their feelings and get immediate validation and solutions to their struggles.” She predicts that over the coming decades, AI will increasingly become a part of care systems and how clients communicate.

And the therapist’s task? “We’re going to have to rethink clinical literacy,” she says, “whether it’s digital coregulation or attachment behaviors. I wonder if we’ll get to a point where we ask about AI from the get-go, the same way I tell clients now that they might find me on social media, and what my boundaries are there. Maybe in the future I’ll say to them, ‘Hey, bring your AI chat to our next session,’ the same way I have them bring their journal entries to therapy.”

Of course, Kaur Kohli says, there will probably be bumps along the way. “There’s a lot we still don’t know about AI,” she says. “It’s still growing, so therapists will need to stay on top of how it’s changing and how clients are using it. We’ve all heard stories about how AI has harmed people. And since I work with clients from diverse backgrounds, I can see how it might not be culturally competent.” Regardless, Kaur Kohli suggests therapists approach AI with an open mind, that they don’t necessarily discourage clients from using it to get help, but that they set the record straight when it gets things wrong.

“I know many therapists are against AI, so there might be some countertransference we have to think about,” she says. “But I’d never want to shame someone looking for answers, because that need is coming from somewhere. What I will do is educate them, and maybe correct the information they’re getting so they’re better equipped to understand what they’re actually going through.”

The truth, Kaur Kohli says, is that many clients are treating AI as a sort of co-therapist, which means therapists must ask themselves some hard questions, namely how this might affect their work, and how willing they are to get on board.

“I’ll admit, resisted to AI for a long time,” Kaur Kohli says. “But now I use it myself. As a field, we have to educate ourselves. We have to think about ethics, and not shaming people, and realize that these tools play a role in our clients’ lives.”

MATTHIAS BARKER on a Growing Ecosystem of Care

In 2025, as more and more clients got their psychoeducation from the likes of TikTok and Instagram, bringing “therapy speak”—and a whole lot of self-diagnosis—into our offices, things got a little complicated. And therapist Matthias Barker believes that in 2026, we’ll be entering a new phase of this trend, one with huge implications for the landscape of mental health care and how clients choose to heal.

With over four million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, and a rising star in the field of trauma, romantic relationships, and family estrangement, Barker has kept his finger on the pulse of how the public consumes psychotherapy content.

“When TikTok burst onto the scene, you had a surge of short-form content,” he says, “and for the first time, the public had access to a wealth of psychological ideas and knowledge.” Concepts like trauma, narcissism, people-pleasing, and even obscure terms like the inner child became part of everyday vocabulary. Notably, consumers began to gravitate toward online communities of like-minded individuals that gave them validation and a sense of belonging when it came to their mental health struggles.

But now, Barker says, the public’s appetite for this short-form online content is beginning to wane. “People are experiencing a kind of ‘brain rot,’” he explains. “They’re deleting their apps, putting limits on their phones, and looking for ways to take their understanding of therapy concepts and go deeper.” How?

“I’m seeing a huge resurgence of online communities and memberships,” Barker says. “Today’s consumers aren’t asking how to get access to information like they were in 2019. They’re asking how to integrate this information, how to work it into their life. They’ve moved from this surfacy, spread-out, scattered psychoeducation to a more relational way of consuming the content, sometimes literally around a table.”

Therapists, Barker says, are starting to take notice. The same clients who used to show their therapists mental health posts on Instagram are now sharing stories from their weekly community group. And while it may be tempting to view these meet-ups as some sort of competition or interference, Barker recommends therapists think of them as an asset, and that they ask clients what these meet-ups entail so they can use them to reinforce therapy.

“Even the best community groups can’t walk someone through a process-oriented intervention,” he explains, “where someone tracks your nervous system, makes sure you’re grounding, resourcing, pausing, slowing down, and regulating. That takes focused one-on-one attention.”

Still, Barker says warming up to the idea of your client getting help elsewhere may require a degree of letting go. “Therapists used to be the all-encompassing source of psychotherapeutic progress,” he says. “They were the mentor, the educator, the companion, and they did the intervention. But today’s client is more informed than they’ve ever been, and this means there’s going to be an ecosystem of mental health care workers—the therapist, the coach, the online community, the friends, and the book club—instead of a single therapist who holds the weight of the entire mechanism of change. Could these groups be echo chambers that reinforce the idea that your mom is a narcissist? Sure. But overall, they’re a thoughtful space for conversations about mental health. And frankly, that’s a refreshing correction to the chaos we’ve been seeing over the last five years.”

JULIE MENANNO on Leaning into Avoidant Attachment

The wealth of psychoeducation available nowadays isn’t just impacting our clients’ sense of self, says couples therapist Julie Menanno. It’s shaking up their romantic relationships.

“I’m seeing lots of cases where one partner finds a new identity for themselves based on diagnostic labels they discovered online,” Menanno explains, “and it sets them on a growth path that seems to leave the other behind. A lot of this is due to social media therapy and the surge in people seeking self-understanding and self-improvement.”

Author of the bestselling book Secure Love, host of The Secure Love Podcast, and with over 1.3 million followers on Instagram, Menanno works from an attachment perspective, which informs her view of couple dynamics. “The anxious partner is far more likely to seek growth because they’re more in touch with their pain,” she explains, “while the avoidant partner is less likely to seek growth because they’re trying to avoid their pain.” This lack of synchronicity frequently breeds resentment, she adds. “Partners might start weaponizing their growth, saying things like, ‘I’m doing all the work and you’re not doing any!’” But this accusing, blaming, and attacking only makes the avoidant partner even less open to change.

So how do you work with this dynamic? Especially when there is some truth to what the anxious partner is saying? The first thing Menanno does is try to get the avoidant partner’s buy-in. “I make it clear that this isn’t going to be therapy where they’re pathologized,” she says.

Once the avoidant partner feels safe, she moves into the next step: highlighting how the conversation—whether it’s about where to get dinner or political ideologies—isn’t going well on both ends. “Then, I lean into the resistance,” she explains. “I say to the avoidant partner, ‘Help me try to understand what it is that’s so scary or doesn’t feel right for you about relationship help? What doesn’t feel good about being here right now?’” Menanno says she often finds that people have good reasons for not wanting help: maybe they associate therapy with divorce, or think they’ll be villainized, or don’t trust that someone who’s not in their relationship can actually be of help. “I might not agree with them,” Menanno says, “but telling people they shouldn’t see it that way is the best way to get them to double down.”

This doesn’t mean that the avoidant partner is off the hook, Menanno clarifies, but it lays the groundwork for delivering tough messages with emotional safety. “As a field and a society, I really want us to start leaning into creating emotional safety,” she says. “It’s so easy to say, ‘This person is just a narcissist, or this person’s political views are wrong.’ But I believe that when we lean into curiosity and say, ‘Let’s meet on a human level to talk about our fears and pain,’ that’s the starting point for fixing just about anything.”

CHINWÉ WILLIAMS on the Rise of Parental Burnout

Looking for a good New Year’s Resolution? Start by showing the parents in your life a little more compassion. Parenting stress and burnout, says therapist Chinwé Williams, will be among the most pernicious issues facing therapists in 2026. In fact, she believes it’s already reached epidemic proportions.

As the author of the bestselling book Calm, Courageous, and Connected: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Emotionally Resilient Kids, Dr. Chinwé, as she’s become known, is well acquainted with the unique struggles facing today’s families. “Parents are navigating a collective trauma due to world events, societal divisiveness, and political polarization,” she explains. They feel overwhelmed, blaming financial instability, childcare costs, technology and social media, and growing isolation.” They’re also feeling the strain of their children’s mental health challenges,” she adds, “like growing rates of anxiety, depression, and bullying among kids and teens.

But Dr. Chinwé says parents aren’t the only ones affected by these stressors: their kids are too. “A parent’s mental health is directly linked to their child’s long-term well-being,” she says. “It impacts their emotional and developmental outcomes.” And these kids are perceptive. “They can easily recognize when mom and dad are stressed. Because children often mirror and absorb the stress they see in adults, parental well-being is crucial for overall family health.”

So what’s the solution? As a trauma specialist and somatic therapist, Dr. Chinwé begins by helping parents learn to regulate their bodies and then provide coregulation to their children. It’s something she had to teach herself to do as a parent at times when her own resilience would hit the wall.

In writing her book, she says she “wanted to give parents permission to look at their own internal world and take care of themselves.” Yes, the typical parenting tools and strategies matter—“but they sit on top of physiology,” she explains. “When a parent’s body is stuck in fight or flight, there’s no substitute for teaching them the importance of nervous system regulation and how it affects their kids’ well-being. I expect that in 2026, there will be a shift from teaching parents strategies that simply put a Band-Aid on the problem, because parents are asking for—and need—more.”

Even if you’re not a parent, you still have an important role to play. After all, extended family members and mentors also have children in their lives. “When I do talks on parenting, nonparents in the audience will come up to me afterward,” Dr. Chinwé says. “They’ll say things like, ‘I have a nephew I’m over the moon about, and I want to support him.’ Many grandparents express the same desire to support their grandchildren, which lightens the load for their adult children. This is intergenerational work,” she explains. “It’s leaving the legacy of wellness.”