Hi there,

I’ve spent much of my adult life believing deeply in therapy. I became a therapist. I’ve sat with people through trauma, grief, relationships ending and beginning, enormous life transitions, and the quieter moments when someone realizes they don’t want to keep living the way they’ve been living.

And lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what therapy can’t do.

Before I became a therapist, I studied anthropology. Humans were finding ways to survive difficult things together long before there were therapy offices. We gathered. We told stories. We created rituals. We fed each other. We mourned and celebrated together.

Therapy can offer something incredibly valuable. A relationship where we can slow down, notice patterns, understand what our bodies are doing, and perhaps experience a kind of safety or attunement we haven’t had before.

But therapy isn’t community.

It can’t give you a neighborhood where someone notices you haven’t been around. It can’t give you the friend who shows up with food. It can’t recreate sitting around a table and realizing that the thing you thought made you strange is something three other people have experienced too.

I’ve been thinking about this more as I’ve found myself creating spaces where people come together, including spaces for therapists themselves.

Something happens when nobody in the room is there to be “fixed.” Someone tells a story. Someone else recognizes themselves in it. People disagree. Someone offers a resource. Two people realize they should know each other. A conversation continues after the gathering ends.

There’s no treatment plan for that.

And yet, I think something important is happening.

Trauma can make our worlds smaller. It can teach us self-reliance, hypervigilance, or that needing other people is dangerous. Of course healing involves developing more capacity inside ourselves.

But I don’t think the goal is to become so regulated, boundaried and self-sufficient that we no longer need anybody.

Maybe part of healing is learning to need people differently.

To belong without disappearing.

To receive without feeling indebted.

To love without abandoning ourselves.

To be witnessed without having to perform.

That isn’t dependence.

And it isn’t independence either.

It’s interdependence.

I think we need more places to practice it.

That’s part of why I created Common Ground, a space for therapists to gather for conversations that matter to us as people and practitioners.

Our next gathering is coming up, and if you're a therapist or helping professional who has been craving more genuine professional community, I'd love to have you there.

​[Join us for the next Common Ground]​

Until next week,

Tanya