Last week I was invited to give a keynote address to the staff of Northlands College in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. It had been decades since I was last that far north in my province, and the mind tends to forget what that kind of remoteness feels like in the body. The trip was punctuated with moments of profound beauty followed by deep sadness. On the drive, the autumn larches glistened in the sun along that first lonely stretch from Prince Albert National Park northward. But soon, golden needles turned to charred remnants of the 2025 fire season. And while I knew the forest burned that summer—I felt it in my lungs and the heaviness in my chest; I volunteered to make meals for displaced evacuees—seeing some small part of the massive scale of what's been lost left me breathless once again.

I notice a striking feature of the culture we are swimming in lately, namely, the pressure to optimize our lives. We strive to prepare the optimal meal plan with the right amount of protein, to eat 30 different plants a week for optimal gut health, to lift a certain amount of weight three times a week, to perfect breadmaking, design our homes for ideal rest and rejuvenation, monitor our step counts, caloric intake, REM sleep, deep sleep, heart rate, and so on. We are encouraged to optimize our relationships, parenting, productivity, and even leisure. There seems to be less room to simply be human without also trying to become a better person.

Many of us know what it’s like to give voice to negative beliefs about ourselves that seem almost impervious to reason. “I’m so stupid,” says the highly credentialed woman quietly to herself. “I’m incapable of love,” says the teacher to their partner. “I’ll never be good enough,” says the CFO to the reflection staring back at him in the bathroom mirror.

We can spend years accumulating evidence that we are worthy of love, capable of meaningful work, or deserving of kindness, only to discover that, in certain moments, none of it seems to matter. Beliefs draw their apparent plausibility from the larger network of meanings in which they are embedded. More importantly, some beliefs carry an emotional weight that far exceeds the evidence from which they first emerged. There is a kind of rationality at work here, even when the beliefs themselves are deeply limiting. Negative core beliefs feel more true in a way that experience rarely seems capable of puncturing.

Something I've noticed in my practice lately is that many therapeutic interventions begin, somewhat paradoxically, by narrowing rather than expanding the way a client is invited to think. I might ask someone to picture themselves at five years old in as much detail as they can, imagine attending their own funeral many decades from now, or consider how they might be different if they woke tomorrow and the one thing that seems to be troubling them had somehow disappeared. Although these exercises emerge from different therapeutic approaches, they share something important. Each introduces a carefully chosen constraint that invites a different way of seeing.

We need one another, yet we cannot guarantee one another's availability. We can reach out to another person when we are hurting, but we cannot ensure they will be able to meet us where we are. Their compassion may be present, but their capacity may not.

You do not need to live next to a data centre or inside an evacuation zone to feel it. You can feel it where you are, when smoke settles over your home, your neighbourhood, your province, your hemisphere, and the season you were counting on begins to shrink around you.

We know, almost instinctively, that there is a difference between the kind of release that settles something and the kind that leaves us more agitated than before. We know it from the argument that ends badly. We know it from the way certain kinds of venting can make the original feeling worse rather than better. We also know it, strangely, from art.

I was dumbfounded the first time a therapist asked me, “Where do you feel that emotion in your body?” For most of my life, my senses—or at least those senses that would help me answer that question—seemed unreliable. Even my sense of direction was confused. North felt like south; east like west. I learned to compensate by turning up the volume on spatial reasoning mediated by linguistic judgment. If I could name the streets and track the logic of the grid, I could still find my way to the MoMA. I could even feel something stir inside as I encountered Agnes Martin’s famous grids.

We all face moments shaped by loss, transition, disillusionment, grief, or the subtle ache of wondering whether this is really the life we meant to live. These moments are as much existential as they are psychological. And, in my view, they deserve a kind of therapy that does not fixate on pathology, but instead meets us with honesty and depth that respects the complexity of the human condition.

What often makes climate-related distress harder is that so much of this is carried alone. Many people tell me they do not know where to speak about their grief for melting ice or disappearing species, about their anger at political inaction, about their shame for continuing to live inside systems they did not choose. These feelings do not always fit into dinner conversation or workplace small talk. Such thoughts can make a person feel strange, or excessive, or out of step with family and society.

This time of year transports many of us back to childhood, where memories, attachments, and losses sit next to each other at the dining table. The smells, sounds, and sights orient us toward how culture, especially family culture, binds us to the past. Some of us find ourselves face-to-face with the most challenging givens of existence, as Irvin Yalom calls them—responsibility, finitude, perhaps even a sense of meaninglessness.

The vigilance that still tightens our breath, the inner critic that scans for failure, the fear that tries to anticipate harm—these responses are part of our survival. They helped our ancestors notice danger, protect themselves, and stay connected to the groups they depended on.

It can be hard to hear ourselves think these days.
Notifications ping, opinions stack up, and the pace of life leaves little room for reflection. Even our inner world can begin to feel crowded with self-doubt, imagined futures, replayed conversations, or quiet pressures to do more, be more, fix more.

Therapy is not a search for perfection but for understanding. It offers a deliberate slowing down and a turning toward what has been avoided or overlooked. When we begin to ask questions with openness rather than urgency, the nature of our struggles can shift.