Therapy for engineers, researchers and technical leads.
For people whose careers look, from the outside, like the thing they were supposed to want — and who privately find that nothing lands.
Free 15-min consultation · In-person Palo Alto or video statewide
The most common opening sentence in this work is a version of: I do not really have a reason to be here. The compensation is good. The team is fine. The work is interesting on paper. There is no crisis to point at and no story that would earn sympathy from anyone.
And then, usually about twenty minutes in, something more specific: that they cannot remember the last time they felt anything strongly. That Sunday evenings have a physical quality. That they are performing competence continuously and have lost track of where the performance ends.
That is not a small complaint dressed up. It is a recognisable condition, it responds to treatment, and the reason it goes unattended for years is that it never presents as an emergency.
Some of what follows is true of ambitious people anywhere. Some of it is specific to this stretch of the peninsula, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Achievement as the only legible language. In an environment where everyone is exceptional, competence stops functioning as a source of esteem and starts functioning as the minimum entry requirement. The thing that used to reliably produce a feeling of worth no longer produces anything at all.
Compensation as a trap. Being paid extremely well to do something that has stopped meaning anything is a genuinely difficult position, and it is nearly impossible to complain about without sounding absurd. So people do not complain. They simply stop expecting to feel much.
The reorg cycle. Teams dissolve, managers change, roadmaps are rewritten. After a few rounds, most people quietly stop investing in anything at work — a rational adaptation with a real psychological cost, because the same protective flatness does not switch off at 6pm.
Visa-linked employment. For a large number of people here, leaving a job is not simply a career decision. That changes the felt meaning of every difficult week, and it is rarely something people feel able to say plainly at work.
Engineers are unusually good at self-analysis. Most of the people I see can describe their own patterns with real precision — the childhood conditioning, the attachment style, the reason they overwork. They have read the books. Some have done years of therapy that consisted mostly of confirming the model.
And the pattern continues anyway. That is not a failure of intelligence or effort. It is that understanding a system and being changed by it are different operations, and the second one does not follow from the first.
Gestalt therapy works on the live edge of a pattern rather than the description of it. In practice that means I will interrupt the well-organised account fairly often, and ask what is happening right now — in your chest, in your hands, in the pause you just took. It is less comfortable than analysis and it is the part that actually moves.
Fifty-minute sessions, usually weekly. Some early-morning and evening slots. In person at 667 Lytton Avenue in downtown Palo Alto, or by video anywhere in California — which for a fair number of people is the only reason it happens at all.
In-network with Aetna, Wellfleet and Stanford SHIP; superbills for other PPO plans. The first conversation is fifteen minutes, free, and exists so you can ask whatever you need to before committing to anything.
Not exclusively, but a large share of the people I see work in engineering, research or product, and the pressures are consistent enough to be worth naming. Mostly it means I will not need the basics explained — what a performance cycle is, what a reorg does to a team, why a green build at 1am is not the same as a good day.
That is one of the most common ways this arrives. Nothing is broken, the job is fine, the compensation is fine, and none of it lands. It is worth taking seriously precisely because there is no crisis to point at — those are the situations that go unattended for years.
Yes, and it is worth saying that the difficulty is rarely the money. It is what happens to a sense of self that has been fused with a role, a badge and a team for several years. That takes longer to metabolise than the job search does.
I hold some early-morning and evening slots. If the only way therapy happens is at 8am before standup, that is a workable arrangement and better than not starting.
No. Therapy records are protected health information and are not shared with your employer, and mental-health treatment does not affect employment-based immigration status. Insurance billing generates a claim to your health plan, exactly as a physiotherapy appointment would, and your employer does not see the contents.
No, though it is worth noticing what work is being used to talk about. Sometimes the job genuinely is the problem. More often it is the place where a much older pattern about worth, competence and being found out has found somewhere to live.
It means I am interested in what is happening as you speak, not only in the account you give of your week. Engineers are frequently superb at the account — structured, accurate, well-argued — and it is often the thing keeping them at a safe distance from their own experience.
I am in-network with Aetna and Wellfleet. For other PPO plans I provide a superbill for out-of-network reimbursement. Full detail is on the insurance page.