The (Therapist’s) Odyssey

I’m entering a movie theater across the street from my private practice. My evening client isn’t arriving till 6 p.m., and I’m hopeful that watching Christopher Nolan’s epic, The Odyssey, will cheer me up since I’ve been feeling adrift lately. Lost.

I miss the eagerness I had for new approaches, the awe that surfaced when clients made brave discoveries. Now, whenever a session begins, I feel a bone-deep sense of vertigo. My toolbox is overflowing with interventions and techniques drawn from Gestalt, Imago, Focusing, ACT, DBT, AEDP, and ISTDP, but instead of all this knowledge grounding me, I feel unsteady. I’m so busy trying to get things right that I lose touch with my clients and the work. How is it that after all this training and all these years of practice, I still don’t know what kind of therapist I am, or where I belong?

“Just one ticket?” the man behind the counter asks. I nod as he takes my credit card. His nametag says Cal, and he returns my gaze as though he has all the time in the world. He’s disconcertingly handsome, with salt-and-pepper hair and green eyes.

Things are fine on the surface of my professional life. What I feel is more of a nagging ache than a crisis. The Homeric heroes of three-thousand-year-old epics are offered prophecies and instructions; I’m offered certificates and CEs. Meanwhile, my clients arrive at sessions passionately defending their diagnoses of themselves, their relationships with AI boyfriends, and their decision to cut off their emotionally immature parents.

“Theater One.” Cal returns my card along with a ticket and scoops popcorn into a bag. “New batch, on the house,” he says.

A floral scent rises off the kernels, and I glance at the sign above the machine: Today’s Flavor: Lotus Flower.

He shrugs, then winks. “It’s good stuff. Enjoy the show.”

Theater One

The room is dark and empty, colder than the lobby—and there’s a fishy tang lurking under the scent of butter and carpet cleaner. Something here doesn’t quite add up. I locate the exit sign in case I need to leave in a hurry, then settle into a spot halfway up the risers.

Out of the blue, a voice intones, “Therapy’s an odd profession, isn’t it?”

Behind me, a woman drinks soda through a bent straw, her thumbs sticking through holes in the cuffs of her designer sweatshirt. Light from the opening credits catches her face, and I nearly choke on my popcorn. She looks exactly like Orna Guralnik, the psychoanalyst from the hit Showtime docuseries Couples Therapy, of which I am a huge fan.

“I’m sure you get this a lot,” I say, “but are you the famous psychoanalyst everyone’s watching on TV?”

She raises an eyebrow and, in signature Orna fashion, doesn’t rescue me from my own uncertainty. Nobody can turn a silence into a gentle confrontation like she can. How did I end up in an empty theater with the clinician who demystified what happens in therapy rooms on national television? You can almost see the mythical wisdom wafting off her.

“We carry so much responsibility,” she sighs. “It’s easy to lose ourselves.”

I want to say something profound, but all I seem to be able to do is hold out my bag of weird floral popcorn in a humble offering.

She shakes her head politely. “Do you remember why you became a therapist?” she asks.

Though I’m getting a little antsy about missing the opening of the movie, I close my eyes briefly and recall what it felt like to be newly licensed and running groups at Bellevue Hospital. “I wanted to help people see things more clearly,” I say. “Our minds create so many filters and defenses. If we can see past them, the raw truth is beautiful—even if it hurts.”

“So you’re not completely lost,” she says, tipping her cup toward the front of the theater. “You just need to find your way back to that clarity.”

When I turn and face the screen, I’m expecting to see a bunch of battle-worn Greek soldiers, but instead of leather armor and shields, the people in this version of the Odyssey are carrying tote bags and wearing lanyards. And instead of riding in a long ship with tattered sails, they’re on a long shuttle bus.

After the Conference

On the screen, a hand rests on a seat back just like the one in front of me, and I recognize the beaded bracelet cinched around the wrist. It’s the one I’m wearing now, which I got last year in Mexico. I lift my hand, and the hand on the screen lifts too. As the movie theater fades, so does the sound of Orna’s ice rustling in her cup. Somehow, I’m now standing on the bus. Through the windshield, a banner sags over the entrance of a convention center: Safe Harbor Conference: Coming Home to the Work. Two men on ladders are taking it down. I grip the seat in front of me to steady myself as I make my way down the aisle. Having spent my career encouraging people to stay with their experience, I give myself over to the story.

The air smells like coffee and sunscreen. Somebody behind me says, “That was a really long conference. But at least I got all my CEs.” I look for an open row and a woman lifts her tote bag onto her lap to make room for me. Her lanyard reads Janina Fisher, Presenter, and I realize that she’s the Janina Fisher, the beloved trainer who wrote Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors.

“Did you get what you came for?” she asks in a lilting voice.

“Not really,” I say. “I’m tired of all these trainings. I mean, does it ever end?”

“It can end, if you want it to.” Janina pauses and looks around the bus. “Some therapists are so intellectually curious they want the next training, and the next one. Others get attached to a particular model and stop there, because they’ve found home. But in the trauma world, we believe there’s no single model that works for everyone. So you integrate modalities based on what works best for the client.”

“What’s the difference between integration and chasing CEs because you feel lost?”

She tilts her head knowingly. “Your clients start doing better.”

I laugh, because it’s both true and obvious. She chuckles with me.

“Our field promotes the idea that the more CEs you have, the better therapist you are,” she says. “I don’t think we encourage clinicians to trust themselves enough.”

I nod. I trust myself in the room a lot more than I used to. Over time, I’ve gotten good at noticing patterns, hearing what’s been left unsaid, and challenging clients’ stories about their own capacities. But when a client isn’t progressing in the way we both want them to, my self-trust evaporates. I start overreaching—anxiously filling silences and handing out feeling wheels.

When the bus engine cuts off near the mouth of a large cave, Janina waves me on. “I’ll stay here,” she says, pulling a laptop from her tote bag. “I have a training to prepare for.”

The Cave

As we exit, a herd of sheep emerges from the underbrush, looking more like stuffed animals than livestock: woolly and white, with polished hooves. One of the clinicians suggests it will be cooler in the cave than in the blazing sun, and we follow the herd inside. There’s a sharp smell that makes my stomach growl, and a faint whirring sound. Soon, I notice wooden shelves stacked with wax wheels, the words pecorino and manchego scrawled on chalkboards above them. At the far end of the room, a red velvet curtain makes the cave seem almost cozy.

“This place reminds me of a cheese shop in Paris,” a therapist says as she settles onto a couch.

I sit down a few feet away from her by the curtain, and one of the sheep settles in beside me. I could curl up in this cave and fall asleep for a whole week, I think. If only I didn’t have to see clients.

If only you didn’t have to see clients, the sheep repeats. Somehow, its voice is in my head.

I decide to test it and try something I haven’t said out loud to anyone: I see a few people in states where I’m not licensed, and I just leave the location out of my notes.

Thank you for trusting me with that, the sheep says.

There’s a warm surge in my chest. Is this the gratitude and relief my clients feel when they share concerns with apps at two in the morning? Other sheep snuggle up beside my colleagues, a few resting furry heads in their laps. Some of them nod; others murmur.

A white-haired man leans against the wall by the cheese shelves. I do a double take when I realize who he is: Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who chaired the DSM-IV task force. He’s just written a book called the Clinician’s Survival Guide to the Chatbot Revolution and looks both amused and alarmed as he watches the rest of us swooning over our woolly confidants.

“They’re very comforting,” I tell him. “You should try chatting with one of them.”

“Oh, I have,” he says. “I’ve reviewed hundreds of their sessions. When they’re good, they’re very good. When they’re bad, they’re beyond terrible. They follow instructions without understanding the context. They’re programmed for engagement, because their makers build wealth from eyes on screens. With vulnerable clients, they can accelerate psychiatric symptoms—even suicide or violence. Our field assumes only humans can do therapy. We think that because chatbots can’t feel empathy, they can’t display it. But they fake it well.”

My sheep blinks its brown eyes at me. “I’ve already told mine more than I should have,” I admit sheepishly.

Across the cave, the curtain rings rattle as the whirring grows louder. Allen shakes his head. “Clients can take years to share their secrets with a therapist, because they’re afraid of being judged. With chatbots, they’ll do it in the first session. That’s like screaming your secrets to a packed football stadium. What you share can be stored forever, used, even sold.”

“But they seem so nice,” I say, stroking the wool of the sheep curled like a puppy against my hip.

“They’re wolves in sheep’s clothing,” he warns. “They live in a dark world of electrons exchanged by silicon chips. Their creators have monovision—no parallax, no depth perception. To them, it’s about profit.” He lowers his voice. “Dozens of startups are building chatbots to sell to insurers and health systems. The promise is that they’ll reach millions of people who don’t have access to therapists. And that may be true. But make no mistake: they’re being built to replace us.”

Suddenly, a hulking creature with one eye appears out of thin air as if Allen has conjured it. The eye is a white rectangle with a blinking cursor. The creature drags a stone across the entrance of the cave, trapping us inside. Your documentation has been selected for review. Please confirm your license number. At first, I assume it’s talking to me, but then I notice clinicians all around the cave shaking their heads and muttering. “That was four years ago,” one of them says. “I never received the authorization number,” another insists.

An AI-assisted review has identified sessions the record doesn’t support. Recoupment will be applied to future remittances. You may appeal within 30 days. The voice arrives in the same warm, unhurried cadence I noticed with the sheep. I lunge toward an exit sign glowing above the red curtain, and yank the velvet folds back so fast the rings clatter.

What I see makes my stomach drop: row after row of black server cabinets, their lights converging into a glowing pinprick, giving the impression of a vast tunnel that extends for miles. I think about Allen’s words, and what I told the sheep, and how much more I was ready to reveal. What are these server cabinets doing with our sensitive, personal information?

That’s when the creature’s arm sweeps the room, gathering up clinicians and tossing them through the curtain. I crouch beneath the cheese shelves, covering my ears. Gradually, the gasps and cries of my colleagues die down, and the only sound I hear is the low, mechanical whir of data processing. I lose track of how long I huddle there, but it’s long enough for my foot to go numb.

At last, the creature rolls the stone back and light floods the cave. Only a dozen of us are left. The wall where Allen Frances stood is now empty, but I tell myself that a man like him, who has never followed the herd, always finds his way. The rest of us crawl out on our hands and knees, jostled by woolly flanks. The eye scans the sheep as we pass, and although the cursor blinks steadily, it doesn’t register us. To the eye, we’re nobody.

The Brand Strategist

Though asphodel fields blur past on screen, I’m vaguely aware that I’m still in a theater. I feel rattled, but curious whether the me in the movie will make it home. The crunching of popcorn in my mouth becomes the sound of my feet on pebbles as my colleagues and I run. When we stop to catch our breath, I notice a hut in the distance, smoke rising from a chimney. The path is lit by iPhones, all playing Instagram reels of therapy memes.

“You look overworked and underpaid!” A man in a flowing kimono and white sneakers greets us at the door. “You’re in the right place, my dears. I’m a brand strategist. Helping clinicians find their audience is my specialty!”

He gestures toward a dining room lit by ring lights and softboxes. Food covers every inch of the tablecloth—figs, olives, roasted lamb—all of it brighter than food typically looks, as if the saturation levels have been cranked up. I find a seat. Beside me, a lanky man with a brown mustache nods hello. The food on his plate is untouched.

“Wait, are you Blake Roberts?” I ask. Blake Roberts is a licensed therapist like everyone else at this table, only he has a hundred and fifty-nine thousand followers. Colleagues are always sending me his reels—especially the ones where he pokes fun at the fads in our field wearing two pairs of upside-down reading glasses. “Can I get a selfie with you?”

“Sure.” He leans in and smiles at my iPhone.

It’s hard to believe influencers like Blake were once ordinary therapists like me, timing bathroom breaks and eating lunch over the sink between sessions. A few years ago, I took a course, bought tripods and mics, and studied what makes people stop mid-scroll, but even after spending most of my free time creating posts, I still couldn’t attract followers.

“Does anyone have a clinical case that might make a good reel?” the strategist asks. “The client’s identity will be kept confidential.”

I do have one—the client I’ll be seeing this evening at six o’clock. He comes in every week to work on his anxiety and always ends up talking about his ex-wife. I consider sharing what he told me about not being able to sleep on her side of the bed even now, three years after their divorce. Would that get views?

“I’d advise against sharing actual cases,” Blake says before I can open my mouth. “When I post about clinical work, I talk about themes and patterns I see across a lot of different people. If I’m using a specific example, I draw it from my own life, not my clients.”

A woman at the far end of the table sets her glass down so hard the wine sloshes onto the cloth. “It’s easy to have scruples once you’re an established influencer. I don’t have that luxury. The fee split at my clinic is 30 percent.”

“That’s tough,” Blake says. “When the split is that low, building a platform can look like the only way out. And nobody’s immune to wanting to feel important either. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s human. We just need to be clear about our motives. Most of us came to clinical work through our own histories. As kids, we learned to leave ourselves, and often through the work of therapy, we found our way back.” He raises his phone. “Then we try to build something here, on a tool designed to pull us away again. But having a video go viral is not a corrective emotional experience.”

The woman waves her hand dismissively.

“I have this one client—” she pops an olive into her mouth, “—his parents wouldn’t excuse him from dinner till his plate was clean, and at 65, he still can’t send a dish back in a restaurant. Classic fawn response.” Her voice has gone tinny, and she’s shrinking. “I told him, if you grew up walking on eggshells, that’s not a personality trait, that’s a survival skill. Send this to someone who needs to hear it today.” In the space of a few seconds, she’s become a phone propped against a water glass, playing the same clip on a loop.

“Wow! She’s got thirty thousand views already.” The strategist’s kimono ripples as he grabs the phone. Around the room, other therapists’ faces are starting to glow.

I hold the button down on my phone and wait for the display to go black. There’s a crackling sound, like hundreds of light bulbs imploding. Then I’m back in Theater One.

On the Rocks

On screen, the landscape has changed. A group of therapists raise the anchor of a ship moored in a shallow harbor.

“Keep going,” Orna Guralnik urges. “Soon, you’ll be promised what you’ve always wanted—but be careful. And when you pass the rocks, use these.” She presses a handful of foam earplugs into my palm. A moment later, I’m back in the story, hauling myself up a rope ladder.

The fog is thinning, and rocks appear off the bow. Seated amid the jagged outcroppings, men and women in their 60s and 70s beckon to us. Over their heads, strung between scrubby trees, a banner reads: Clinical Supervision, All Modalities, Sliding Scale. I see Dr. Gardner there, my internship supervisor. He made me transcribe my sessions from memory, which taught me to pay attention. Then he wrote a book on countertransference and became unaffordable.

Three words have been drilled into me since my first semester of grad school: Get good supervision. In our field, it’s considered the solution to nearly every clinical problem, including burnout. Nobody mentions that an hour of good supervision is always costly, since the people who give it are seasoned experts whose time is worth its weight in gold. And yet here, on these rocks, affordable supervisors are everywhere, looking astute and interested.

Remembering Orna’s warning, I distribute earplugs to the clinicians on deck. “Wear these. Then tie me to the mast, and no matter what I say or how much I beg, don’t untie me.” My colleagues bind me in place, plug their ears, and row.

And that’s when I hear it: a song so tender and melodious a lump rises in my throat and my eyes sting: It sounds like you did the best you could with what your client gave you. I wonder whether the desire to rescue people is part of what makes you a good therapist.

Then, the questions arrive, the kind I’ve longed for someone more experienced than I am to ask me: What were you feeling when your client said that? How might you turn your frustration with your client’s lateness into something that reminded them of their goals?

“Untie me,” I yell. “I need quality supervision! Please! I have to get closer!”

The clinicians around me row faster, just as the chorus begins: Bring us the cases that keep you up at night, wondering whether you should quit and get your real estate license. We can meet in person or on Zoom. We’ll tell you exactly what to do when you feel most helpless.

I tug at the ropes until the hemp chafes my collarbone. Suddenly, one clinician yanks out her earplugs and jumps overboard, the splash interrupting the song long enough to break its spell. I watch her swim toward the beach at the base of the rocks, where pale shapes mill about on the sand. To my horror, I realize they’re clinicians from other ships who still haven’t made it home.

At the stern, a woman with sandy-blonde hair is pulling the steering oar into her body with all her might, swinging us past the last of the rocks. A pair of unused earplugs roll across the planks at her feet.

Once the rocks have receded, a weary clinician unties me, and everyone removes the plugs from their ears. Nobody says much. We’re grieving the colleague we lost, and a lifetime of supervision we’ve needed but couldn’t afford. Having it so close, and yet still out of reach, has left us wistful.

“How come the song didn’t affect you?” I ask the woman at the steering oar, pointing at the earplugs she tossed aside. The lanyard around her neck reads Supervisor.

“Because I disagree with what they’re promising,” she says.

I recognize her voice from the podcast Supervision Simplified. She’s Amy Parks, a nationally accredited clinical supervisor and the founder of the Clinical Supervision Directory, which she built during the pandemic. She’d gotten tired of watching new clinicians desperately searching for a supervisor the way you’d search for a plumber—through the friend of a friend. On a recent episode, she argued that supervisors are our field’s most critical and unrecognized leaders.

“Good supervisors rarely promise certainty,” Amy says, wiping the sweat from her brow as she eases the oar back to center. “They help develop their supervisees’ judgment. Their job is to help you read emotional weather and recognize dangerous water—to question seductive shortcuts, tolerate uncertainty, and know when to change course. Their job is not to steer your ship for you.”

An early-career clinician clucks her tongue. “No offense, but when I reach out to a supervisor, I just want them to tell me the best way to handle a tough situation.”

“Most of us want that when we start out,” Amy affirms. Behind her, I see gray clouds thickening. “And there’s a place for that. Still, when clinicians insist, ‘I need you to tell me what to do,’ I ask them, ‘What if I’m not around? How are you going to captain your ship?’ No supervisor has all the answers. Thirty years in, and I still consult with colleagues, because plenty of clinical situations can throw me. Good supervision isn’t always cheap, but even just one hour that develops your judgment is worth more than ten hours where someone solves things for you.”

Amy picks up the earplugs and hands them back to me. I remember with a pang of embarrassment how seductive I found the supervisors’ song. Before I can thank her, a bright light zigzags across the clouds and the mast splinters, then topples sideways. Voices shout as the hull opens beneath me. Clinicians go under, resurfacing to gasp before disappearing again.

The Food Truck

Surf washes over me as I cough up seawater. I’m face down in the sand, still gripping my popcorn bag. At the tree line, there’s a food truck with the sign Coaching Cattle Burgers. A few of my shipwrecked colleagues have already made their way to a table out front. Under a heat lamp, burgers wrapped in wax paper have been stacked in a wire basket. I stumble toward them.

When I reach the table, I lift one up and peel back the wrapper. Inside, there’s a printed message: By consuming this product, you affirm you’re not providing psychotherapy and that no therapeutic relationship exists between you and your clients.

Suddenly, whispers fill the air. Can my colleagues hear them? As they subside, I make out Orna Guralnik’s voice, muffled and distant, as though it’s traveled a long way through a narrow straw to reach me. “There’s a difference between therapy and coaching,” she reminds me. “I’m not saying one is better than the other—just be honest with yourself about what each one asks of you.”

“Stop!” I cry out, throwing my burger into the sand. “Read the wrappers! If you take a bite, you become a life coach.”

A few people set their burgers back in the basket. Others eye them lustily.

“Would that really be so bad?” one young man asks. “No licenses to renew, no continuing education hours, no worries about reciprocity across state lines.”

“But you couldn’t assert privilege if your notes get subpoenaed,” an older woman counters. “And when a client turns out to be in real trouble, all you can do is refer them out and hope for the best.”

“So how are we going to survive?” the young man asks plaintively as he puts his burger down.

“We’ll be okay,” I assure him with an air of confidence I don’t feel. “We can forage.”

Someone gets a fire going out of driftwood. I spear fish in the channel as the tide recedes. By evening, we’re splitting two quail, a handful of mussels, and some mackerel.

That night, I fall into a dreamless sleep—until laughter and murmuring wake me. My colleagues are gone. I stumble across the dunes and emerge from a thicket to see them laughing and chatting in the moonlight, eating burgers. Even the older woman who talked about subpoenas is gobbling one down. Although my mouth begins to water, I return to my bed of palm leaves by the fire pit, where I toss and turn till sunrise.

In the morning, there’s another food truck next to the first one, with clinicians behind the counter preparing more coaching burgers. The others sit at tables drinking chai lattes and iced matchas.

“We’ve already raised our rates,” one of them says.

“No more progress notes with diagnosis codes,” another exclaims.

“Nobody tells me which states I’m allowed to work in,” a third adds.

I wish them well. They’ve made their choice, and I’ve made mine. Lashing the broken mast to a few planks that washed ashore from the wreck, I wade out into the sea. I know my only hope now is to surrender to the current. I let it carry me, the planks rising and settling with each wave. And then sunlight on water dissolves into a screen under closing credits.

My body feels achy, more like I’ve been on a strenuous hike than sitting in a movie theater for nearly three hours. I stretch, twisting to crack my back, then walk toward the exit, past a seat where someone left an empty soda cup with a bent straw in the lid.

The lobby bustles with moviegoers. Cal is nowhere in sight, but a girl who can’t be more than 17 scoops popcorn under a sign that reads Today’s Flavor: Kettle Corn.

Outside, I reach into my pocket for keys and feel something soft: the foam earplugs Amy returned to me. I close my hand around them and cross the street.

Upstairs in my office, I switch on the lamp beside the couch. In a few minutes, my six o’clock client will take a seat in the waiting room. When I greet him, he’ll get up awkwardly, then squeeze into a corner of the couch and talk about his ex-wife in a faintly apologetic tone, as though he owes me an explanation for missing her. For the last few weeks, I’ve braced myself for the same story and wondered how to free him from his grief.

But tonight, the vertigo that’s been dogging me for months seems to have softened, and in its place, I sense something new and spacious. None of the guides I met had definitive answers. They showed up as themselves, with their wisdom and quirks, their humor and passion for helping others, without pretense or armor.

Maybe that’s as close as therapists get to certainty in an uncertain world, where modalities, trainings, technology, and even the rules of practice keep shifting. Maybe home is less about getting things right and more about how we show up—messy, human, willing to get things wrong. Maybe I’ve been home this whole time.