“It’s already February. Why am I still having my January blues?”

My client, a thirty-something woman looking for support as she navigates a tricky transition in her life, looks disgusted with herself. I understand her frustration. She has had a “flat month” (her description) and is ready for some energy to return. We started the month reflecting that feelings of melancholy and nostalgia around the New Year are very common. For some it’s because the turn of the year acts as an emotional “time marker” that invites reflection on what has ended, what was lost, and what did not go as hoped. For her, it was a sense of weight and feeling like the year ahead was going to be hard work. She had started a new business the year before and it wasn’t growing as quickly as she thought it would. It didn’t help that her social media kept blathering on about New Year’s resolutions and “fresh start” narratives). 

Recently, I met with a teenage client who was torn over a decision—whether to join her friends on a weekend camping trip. She’d never been before, and the uncertainty of it all filled her with dread. What if she hated it? What if she felt trapped out in the woods, wishing she could go home? At the same time, she didn’t want to be left out, or have her friends think poorly of her for not going. Her best friend especially wanted her to go and she felt terrible about the prospect of letting her down.

A theme has cropped up in my practice lately. I first suspected that attachment wounding was the culprit, but then I wondered if it was more nuanced than that. Parents were expressing profound distress as their children individuated. Mostly their children were adolescents, but there were adult children too (some children are late to the individuation game). This distress went beyond the ordinary grief that parents feel for the lost closeness of early childhood. These symptoms bore a closer resemblance to those seen in addiction withdrawal, complex trauma, or deep attachment wounding.​

I DON’T BELIEVE there are any shortcuts in life. This is one of my core beliefs and while therapy teaches us the value in questioning our core beliefs, this one has continually held up under scrutiny. So when I was at a party the other night and someone told me that one medicine-assisted-therapy session (specifically, LSD) was like getting a year’s worth of therapy in one go, I got curious.