Category Archives: Purpose and Identity

Values, direction and meaning.

When Everyone Around You Is Shrinking

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A woman in a white eyelet dress holds a ceramic bowl of red cherries and green plums close to her body

I want to talk about something I’ve been noticing, first in my own life and then in almost every conversation I have with women right now.

It starts small. A friend at brunch who takes three bites and says she’s just not that hungry anymore. A mom at school pickup whose jeans are suddenly hanging off her. The group chat where someone mentions, half joking, that she “started a little something.” Then one day you look around the room and realize that nearly everyone you know is getting smaller. Some of them so small that their bodies start to look like they belong to someone much younger than the life they’re living.

Nobody said anything to you. Nobody told you that you needed to change. But you catch your reflection in the car window on the way home, and something in you has quietly shifted. You don’t feel fit enough. You don’t feel attractive enough. You’re doing math about your own body that you never agreed to start doing.

If that’s you, I want you to know two things before we go any further. You are not shallow for feeling this. And you are not stuck with it.

Is this a suburbs thing, an American thing, or something bigger?

It’s the question I keep hearing, and one I’ve asked myself: is this just where we live?

The honest answer is that it’s bigger than any one zip code, and it follows money more than it follows a map.

The numbers have moved fast. In late 2025, KFF found that about one in eight American adults were currently taking a GLP-1 medication like Ozempic, Wegovy or Zepbound, double the share from a year and a half earlier, and women were more likely than men to be on one. Many of those people take them for exactly what they were designed for: diabetes, heart health, obesity. I want to be really clear that this piece is not about them. A medication your doctor prescribed for your health is not a character question.

What’s newer is who else is using them. A large study of US medical records in the journal Obesity found that prescriptions to adults with no apparent approved reason grew more than thirteenfold between 2021 and 2025, and about a third of those people had a BMI in the normal range. The pattern leaned toward people who are more financially comfortable and privately insured.

It isn’t only an American story, either. In the UK, an analysis of more than 110,000 private prescriptions found that roughly four in five went to women, uptake peaked between ages 30 and 49, and use was higher in wealthier areas even though those areas have less obesity. Researchers in Brazil have written that using these drugs for slimness is quietly redefining what a “responsible” body looks like, and they warn against shaming the people who use them, because the pressure is cultural, not personal.

So if it feels like the suburbs, that’s not your imagination. Suburbs gather people of similar income and similar life stage into the same rooms: the same school gym, the same Pilates studio, the same Saturday sidelines. When a trend follows money, it shows up there first and all at once. But what you’re seeing is a cultural shift, not a local quirk. We spent a decade hearing that every body was welcome, and in about two years, thin quietly became something you could order.

Why it gets under your skin, even when you know better

Here’s what I find reassuring about the research, strange as that sounds: the way you’re reacting is exactly how humans are built.

Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Leon Festinger described our deep drive to size ourselves up against the people around us, a drive that gets stronger when we feel unsure of where we stand. Decades later, a meta-analysis of 156 studies found that comparing our appearance to others is reliably linked to feeling worse about our bodies, and that the link is stronger for women than for men.

And here’s the part that explains why this moment stings so much. In one study of university women, comparing themselves to peers they actually knew was tied to more body dissatisfaction than comparing themselves to models or celebrities. We’ve gotten pretty good at rolling our eyes at a magazine cover. It’s much harder to roll your eyes at your best friend, your sister in law, or the woman next to you at spin class.

The younger part of you who is watching

Sometimes the reaction is bigger than the moment. You notice a friend’s new collarbones and suddenly you’re thirteen again, in a dressing room, or at a family dinner where someone commented on your plate.

That’s not you being dramatic. In therapy we often talk about parts: the younger versions of us who learned, a long time ago, that love or safety or belonging depended on how we looked. When everyone around you is shrinking, that younger part gets loud. She’s scanning the room the way she learned to, asking the questions she has always asked. Am I still okay? Will I still belong?

If that’s what’s happening for you, that’s okay. She isn’t the problem. She’s just been left in charge of a decision that belongs to the adult you.

Coming back to your adult self

I’ll be honest with you, because I’d want you to be honest with me. I’ve felt the pull too. Watching women around me change, I caught myself wondering whether I should be doing the same. What brought me back was a simple, stubborn truth about my own life: a strong body is what serves me best. I want a body that can carry what my days ask of it, stay present through long hours with the people who count on me, and keep moving for a long time. That’s the body I’m choosing to build.

That’s what coming back to your adult self looks like in real life. Not shaming the younger part for being scared. Turning toward her the way you would with a child who’s upset, and telling her: I see you. I know why you’re worried. I’ve got this now. You’re safe, and you don’t have to earn your place by getting smaller.

The adult you gets to ask better questions than the younger one can. Not “how do I look next to her?” but “what do I want my body to be able to do in ten years? What does taking care of myself actually look like, for me?”

Sometimes the answer includes a real conversation with your doctor about your health, and that’s a grown up decision that belongs to you. What I want for you is that the choice gets made by the woman you are now, with good information and a lot of care, and not by the thirteen year old in the dressing room.

Pride in the body that carries you

There’s a small, lovely line of research I come back to often. Psychologist Jessica Alleva and her colleagues created a writing program called Expand Your Horizon. Women who were unhappy with their bodies spent three short sessions, about fifteen minutes each, writing about what their bodies can do and why that matters to them. Nothing about how they look. Afterward, they felt better about their bodies, including their appearance, and saw themselves less as something to be judged. The shift held a month later.

That tells me something hopeful. You don’t have to love how your body looks this week to start feeling proud of it. You can begin with what it does.

So tonight, or this weekend, try this. Grab a notebook and write for fifteen minutes about everything your body did for you this week. It carried you through a hard meeting. It held someone you love. It walked you home in the cold. It healed a cut you already forgot about. It woke up, again. Write it like a thank you note, not a report card.

A few other things help too. Notice when your chest tightens while you scroll, and give yourself permission to mute accounts, even ones that belong to people you like. You can love someone without needing a daily view of their body. When the comparison comes up with a friend, try getting curious instead of going quiet: most women are feeling some version of this, and saying it out loud tends to shrink the shame instead of you. And move your body for how it feels, not how it looks. Strength, breath, the walk that clears your head.

If you want help with this

Some of this you can do on your own, with a notebook and a little honesty. Some of it needs company, especially when that younger part has been running things for a long time.

At Marra, the first step is a free 15 minute consultation with our intake team. You tell them what’s going on, and they help you find the therapist here who fits. If nobody here is right for you, we’ll tell you that and point you somewhere better. We’re in River West and see clients online anywhere in Illinois, and you can meet our therapists before you commit to anything at all. When you’re ready, Book a Consultation.

You don’t need a crisis to deserve support. Feeling a little less at home in your own body lately is plenty.

If thoughts about food, weight or your body have started taking over your days, you deserve specialized care, and the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline at (866) 662-1235 is a good place to start. If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. It’s free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day.

Yesterday I went down a rabbit hole.

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It started innocently enough. I’m a founder, and I’m competitive, and I told myself I was doing research: looking at what other practices were building, how they were growing, what they were launching. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being research. I wasn’t learning anymore. I was keeping score. And by the end of it, I didn’t feel inspired. I felt small.

If you’ve ever scrolled through someone’s promotion announcement, their beautiful new office, their book deal, their engagement, their “so grateful for this season” post, and closed the app feeling like you’re somehow losing a race you didn’t sign up for, this one is for you.

Comparison isn’t the problem. The spiral is.

Comparing ourselves to others is wired into us. Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Leon Festinger described what he called social comparison theory: we figure out how we’re doing, in part, by looking at the people around us. It’s how we’ve always oriented ourselves in a group.

So I’m not going to tell you to stop comparing. You won’t, and neither will I. What matters is what happens after the comparison. Research on envy shows it comes in two flavors. One kind motivates us: we see someone ahead and think, “I want that, and I can work toward it.” The other kind deflates us: we see someone ahead and think, “I’ll never get there, and something must be wrong with me.” Same trigger, completely different story.

Yesterday I was living in the second story.

There’s grief in it, too

When I slowed down enough to feel what was underneath, it wasn’t just jealousy. It was grief. Grief that I’m not there yet. Grief for the timeline I imagined for myself, the version of this business I thought I’d have by now.

I think we skip this part. We go straight from “they have it” to “what’s wrong with me,” and we never pause to let ourselves be sad about the gap. But grief deserves a little room. You’re allowed to want something and ache that it hasn’t happened yet. That ache doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you care.

The feeling was younger than I am

Here’s what I noticed when I really sat with it: the “I’m not good enough” spiral didn’t feel like a 40-something founder talking. It felt young. Like a much younger version of me, scanning the room, trying to figure out if she measured up, if she was worthy of being chosen.

That’s often the tell. When a feeling is way bigger than the situation in front of you, it’s usually not about the situation in front of you. Someone else’s success didn’t create that wound. It just pressed on a bruise that was already there.

So I asked myself a simple question: how old do I feel right now? And the answer helped me separate what was happening today from what was being stirred up from a long time ago.

Coming back to my adult self

Getting out of the spiral didn’t come from talking myself into feeling amazing. It came from coming back to the adult version of me. The one who has built something real. The one who knows how hard this work is. The one who can hold that younger part with compassion instead of letting her drive the car.

Sometimes that looks like putting my feet on the floor and taking a breath. Sometimes it’s saying out loud, “I’m an adult, I’m safe, and this is just a feeling.” Sometimes it’s texting a friend who knows me. Nothing fancy. Just a return.

Change the questions you’re asking

When I’m in the spiral, my questions sound like this: Why am I not there yet? What am I doing wrong?

Those questions feel productive, but they’re really just self-criticism wearing a trench coat. They don’t lead anywhere useful.

So I swap them out. Instead I ask: What can I learn from what I’m witnessing? And I remind myself that I have no idea what that person is carrying. I don’t know what they sacrificed, what help they had, what debt they took on, what it cost them, or what they’re struggling with that never makes it to Instagram. I’m comparing my full, messy inside to their curated outside.

And then the most useful question of all: what’s one thing from their playbook I could apply at the scale I’m at right now? Not their scale. Mine.

If you’ve done any therapy, you might recognize this. It’s a core piece of CBT called cognitive restructuring: noticing the automatic thought, questioning whether it’s actually true, and replacing it with something more accurate and more helpful. I realized I’d been doing it without even naming it.

A few shifts that actually help

Treat envy as information. Envy is pointing at something you want. Instead of shaming yourself for feeling it, get curious. What exactly did you want in what you saw? Sometimes the answer surprises you, and sometimes you realize you don’t actually want their life at all, just one piece of it.

Compare yourself to who you were a year ago. That’s the only comparison that tells you anything true about your growth. Pull up an old calendar or an old journal entry and look at how far you’ve come.

Research with intention, not on autopilot. There’s a difference between “I’m going to spend 20 minutes studying how three practices structure their services” and an hour of wandering scrolling. Set the purpose and the timer before you open the tab. When the learning stops, close it.

Find the next step, not the whole staircase. Their success is the result of hundreds of small decisions you’ll never see. You don’t need to catch up to all of them. You need to take your next one.

Let the grief be there. If you’re sad you’re not further along, say so. To yourself, to a friend, to your therapist. Feelings that get named tend to loosen their grip.

Where I landed

By the end of the day, the person whose work sent me spiraling hadn’t changed at all. What changed was the question I was asking. I went from “why not me” to “what can I learn,” and from a scared younger version of me back to the grown woman who’s actually running this thing.

You’re not behind. You’re on your own timeline, carrying your own story, building at your own scale. And the fact that someone else’s success stirs something in you just means you still want big things for your life. That’s not a flaw. That’s a pulse.

Is It Jealousy, or Is It Grief?

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I want to talk about something I hear constantly, and almost never hear a woman say out loud without apologizing for it in the same breath.

You know the moment. Someone posts the ring. The offer letter. The keys. The ultrasound, the one in the group chat where everyone answers within ninety seconds. And before your face can arrange itself into the right expression, your body gets there first. A drop in your stomach. Heat across your chest. That tight little knot at the base of your throat that shows up about a second before tears do.

Then the second wave: what is wrong with me.

I want to slow that second wave down, because you’re about to spend the rest of the night arguing with yourself about whether you’re a good person, and I can tell you from years of sitting with women in exactly this spot that it’s not the argument that helps.

Here’s what I actually think is happening. That knot is usually not jealousy, and it’s almost never a character flaw. Most of the time it’s envy, which is a different emotion with different research behind it, and underneath the envy there is very often grief. Real grief, for a life you didn’t choose or haven’t reached yet, that nobody in your life has ever recognized as a loss. Getting the name right changes everything about what you can do with it. Envy that gets named tends to point somewhere useful. Envy that gets scolded goes underground and comes back later as resentment, usually at someone who didn’t earn it.

Let me correct one word

We use jealousy for everything, so let’s sort it out, because the precision genuinely helps.

Jealousy is about losing something you already have. There are three people in it: you, someone you love, and a rival. It’s the feeling of a door you thought was yours starting to swing.

Envy is about wanting something you don’t have. There are two people in it: you, and the person holding the thing. Researchers have been separating these since Parrott and Smith’s work in the early nineties, and they really are different experiences. Envy comes with longing and a sting of inferiority. Jealousy comes with fear and watching.

So when your friend announces the pregnancy and your throat closes, that’s almost certainly not jealousy. Nobody is taking anything from you. You are standing in front of something you want, and your body just told you that you want it.

Which sounds worse, I know. Jealousy at least comes with a villain. Envy just comes with you, wanting.

Stay with me, because this is where it gets useful.

What’s actually underneath it

This is the part I most want to hand you.

Envy is very often the surface of grief. Not grief for a person. Grief for a version of your life.

There’s a name for this. Kenneth Doka called it disenfranchised grief: loss that the people around you don’t recognize as loss, so nobody helps you carry it. No casserole, no card, no day off. It’s grieving the career you set down. The city you left because it made sense at the time. The relationship you ended for good reasons that you’d end again. The child you didn’t have, or haven’t had yet, or are still deciding about. The years you spent holding a family together while your own life idled in the driveway. The version of you who would have taken the risk, gone to the thing, said it out loud.

And here’s what I want you to notice about that whole list.

Almost none of it is about not being able to.

We were handed a very specific order of operations. School, then the job, then the person, then the house, then the baby, roughly on schedule, and if you did it right it would feel like arriving. A lot of us did it out of order. A lot of us did it and it didn’t feel like arriving. A lot of us are in our late thirties looking at a life we chose on purpose and grieving it anyway, which is a confusing thing to admit at a baby shower.

So sit with the knot honestly and it’s usually one of two things. “I’m not there yet.” Or, “I made a different call, and I’m only now feeling what it cost.”

Neither of those is inadequacy. Both of those are grief.

You made choices. Some were good choices you’d make again tomorrow. And they still cost you something, and the cost gets to be sad. Yes, and. You don’t have to pick which one is the true one.

Why “I should just be happy for them” backfires

Here’s the move most of us make. We feel the knot, we clock it as ugly, and we go straight to performance. We type the message. We say we’re thrilled. And we are, partly, which is exactly why the whole thing is so disorienting.

But when you jump to “I should just be happy for her,” you’re not processing the feeling. You’re supervising it. And a feeling under supervision doesn’t leave. It waits.

Try thinking about your envy the way you’d think about a kid who’s upset about something she can’t explain yet. Sending her out of the room doesn’t settle her down. Sitting with her does.

You can be genuinely glad for your friend and quietly heartbroken for yourself in the same five minutes. That is not hypocrisy. That’s being a whole person with more than one thing going on.

The feeling has a direction, and you get some say in it

Here’s the research that gives me real hope about this one.

People who study envy have found it splits into two very different kinds. One kind moves you up. You see what she has and something in you leans forward: I want that, and I want to know what it would take. The other kind moves her down. You see what she has and something in you starts building a case, against her, or against how she got it, or against women like her.

Same knot in the throat. Two completely different destinations.

What decides the direction is mostly what you do in the first few minutes, and whether you told yourself the truth about what you were feeling. Which is why the naming matters as much as it does. “I’m a jealous person” is a verdict, and verdicts have nowhere to go. “I’m grieving that I’m not there yet” is information, and information can be worked with.

Your body said it first

The knot arrived before the thought did. That’s not a malfunction, that’s just the order these things happen in.

There’s good research on what happens when we put a feeling into words: naming an emotion accurately turns its volume down, which is a strange and generous fact about how we’re built. The catch is that it has to be the right word. “I’m being petty” doesn’t calm anything, because it isn’t true, and some part of you knows it isn’t true.

So next time the knot shows up, try this instead of the scolding.

Put a hand on your chest. Not as a wellness ritual. Just because warmth and pressure on your sternum actually settles a nervous system, and because you’d do it for a friend without thinking about it for a second.

Then ask, with real curiosity: what am I longing for right now?

Not what’s wrong with me. What am I longing for. Those two questions take you to completely different rooms.

Then wait for the honest answer, which is usually smaller and more specific than you’d expect. Sometimes it isn’t the house, it’s being settled. It isn’t the baby, it’s being chosen. It isn’t the promotion, it’s somebody finally noticing how hard you’ve been working with no one watching.

That answer is the beginning of a conversation, not the whole conversation. But it’s a much better place to start than shame.

And it isn’t too late, mostly

I want to be honest with you here, because there’s a whole industry telling women that nothing is ever closed, and that isn’t quite true. You’d know I was managing you if I said it.

Some doors close. Some of them close on things that mattered enormously, and that grief is real. It deserves to be treated as grief and not as a motivation problem to be solved with a planner.

Yes, and. Far less is closed than it feels like at 11pm with a phone in your hand. Career changes at 38 are ordinary. So are first babies, first marriages, second marriages, leaving the marriage, moving countries, going back to school, making new close friends in a new decade of your life. When the story in your head says the window shut, that’s usually grief talking, and grief is not a reliable narrator about the future. It’s an excellent narrator about the past.

The work isn’t to talk yourself out of the feeling. It’s to figure out which part of it is mourning and which part is a nudge, because those two need completely different things from you. The mourning needs a witness. The nudge needs you to actually do something.

What this looks like when it’s moving

Women bring this to therapy more often than you’d think, and they almost never call it grief when they walk in. They call it comparison. They say they’re on their phone too much, or they don’t like who they become around one particular friend, or they had a hard time at a shower in June and they still feel bad about it in September.

What shifts isn’t that you stop noticing what other women have. You’ll keep noticing. We’re comparing creatures and we’re not going to fix that.

What shifts is the recovery time. The knot shows up and you know what it is inside a minute instead of a week. You stop needing her to be secretly unhappy in order for you to feel okay. You can send the congratulations and mean it, and then go feel your own thing on your own time, which is the version of this that actually holds up. And usually something practical starts happening too, because a longing you’ve finally named tends to start asking you for things.

Four questions to sit with

When the knot shows up next, these will do more for you than an hour of scrolling.

What exactly am I longing for here? Get underneath the object to the experience. Not the wedding, the being claimed. Not the title, the being taken seriously.

Is this something I chose against, or something I haven’t reached yet? Those feel identical in the body and they need completely different things from you.

If this was a choice I made, what did I get in exchange? Name it honestly, including the parts you would still choose. Grief and gratitude are roommates.

What’s one small thing that would move me toward this? Small on purpose. One conversation, one question, one email.

If you want help with this

Some of this you can do on your own, with a hand on your chest and an honest question. Some of it needs a witness, especially the grief nobody in your life has ever called grief.

At Marra, the first step is a free 15 minute consultation with our intake team. You tell them what’s going on, and they help figure out which of our therapists is the right fit for it. If nobody here is right for you, we’ll tell you that and point you somewhere better. Sessions are 55 minutes. We’re in River West and we see clients online anywhere in Illinois, and you can meet our therapists before you commit to anything at all.

You don’t need a crisis to deserve this. A knot in your throat you’ve been arguing with for a year is plenty.

If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. It’s free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day.

Just moved to Chicago? Why finding a therapist should be near the top of your list

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The boxes are mostly unpacked. You have found a coffee place and figured out which train gets you to work. Everyone back home keeps asking if you love it yet, and you keep saying yes, because you mostly do. And then some Tuesday night you are sitting in an apartment that still does not smell like yours, scrolling, and you realize you have not had a real conversation in nine days.

We hear a version of this on consultation calls every single week: I just moved to Chicago and I’m looking for a new therapist. Sometimes the person had a therapist in their old city and lost them at the state line. Sometimes they never had one and the move cracked something open. Either way, they are onto something. A move is one of the most underrated stressors a person goes through, and it is one of the best times to start therapy, not because something is wrong with you, but because so much is changing at once.

Why a move hits harder than it looks

On paper a move is logistics. In the body it is a total reset. Your nervous system spent years learning a place: which streets feel safe at night, where the light comes from in your bedroom, the sound of your building, the faces you pass without thinking. All of that was doing quiet work to keep you regulated. In a new city it is gone, and your system has to relearn safety from scratch. That is why people feel wired and exhausted at the same time in a new place, sleep badly for months, and cannot explain why a small thing sets them off.

Then there is the community piece. Loneliness in a new city is not a character flaw. It is math. Friendship takes repeated, unplanned contact over time, and you left all of yours behind on the same day. Research on relocation consistently finds that the first year after a move carries higher rates of anxiety and low mood, even for people who moved for something good, a job, a partner, a fresh start. Wanting the move and grieving what it cost are not opposites. Most people feel both, and feel guilty about the second one.

And moves rarely come alone. A new job with new politics. A relationship that just became a live in relationship. A partner who has friends here while you have none. Aging parents who are suddenly a flight away. Each of those is its own transition. Stacked, they are a lot for anyone.

What a therapist actually does with this

Not make the transition disappear. Nobody can do that, and you would not want them to. What therapy does is build your internal capacity to carry it.

In practice that looks like a few things. It is one steady hour a week in a city where nothing else is steady yet, which matters more than it sounds. It is learning to read what your body is doing when it is on high alert in a new place and having tools to bring it down, so a stressful commute does not become a ruined evening. It is sorting out which of the hard feelings are about Chicago and which ones came with you in the moving truck, because a move has a way of surfacing old material about belonging, family, and who you are when nobody around you knows your history.

It is also about communicating better through the change. Moves strain relationships, with the partner you moved with, the friends you left, the parents who did not want you to go. Having somewhere to work out what you actually need before you try to say it to the people you love changes those conversations.

And it gives you perspective. When you are inside a transition it feels permanent. A therapist who has walked many people through their first Chicago year can tell you honestly: this is hard, and this is what the middle of it looks like, and here is what tends to happen next. That alone lowers the temperature.

How to find the right therapist in Chicago

A few things we tell people who call us new to the city.

Start with fit, not proximity. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and it is tempting to pick whoever is closest. But you will be telling this person things you have not said out loud, and that only works if you feel matched. Look at what they specialize in, how they describe their work, whether they sound like someone you could sit across from. A ten minute ride to the right person beats a two minute walk to the wrong one.

Check the insurance piece early, because it changes when you move. Your plan may have new in network options in Illinois, or your employer may have switched you to a new one. Our FAQ walks through how it works. We are in network with BCBS, Cigna, Aetna and United, and we will tell you on the first call what your plan actually covers.

Decide how you want to meet. In person is worth it if you can make it work, especially in a new city where you are short on real rooms with real people. Many of our clients come to us from West Loop, Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square. But online therapy anywhere in Illinois is a real option too, and it means your therapist stays yours if you move neighborhoods again in year two, which people often do.

Use the consultation. A free consultation is a short call where you say what is going on and hear how the therapist would approach it. It is the fastest way to know if the fit is there, and you should feel free to do a couple before choosing. You are not committing to anything. You are interviewing.

A note from someone who has done it

I have moved state to state, and before that I moved countries. Coming to the United States was one of the hardest things I have done, and I did it without anyone guiding me through the ups and downs. There was a long stretch where I questioned whether it had been the right decision. I know now that it was. But I wish I had had someone to bounce that off of, someone to remind me to take care of myself when the checklist was eating every hour, someone to keep me accountable, and a third set of eyes making sure the transition was not quietly turning into something heavier.

I have lived with a baseline of anxiety and depression my whole life, so I know how easily a big change can tip that. Having support before the move, not after, would have changed that first year for me.

The part nobody tells you: find the therapist before you need one

Here is the pattern we see. People arrive with a list. Apartment, job, DMV, doctor, dentist, gym, a couple of friends. Therapist is on the list, somewhere near the bottom, under “when things settle down.” Things do not settle down for a while. So the therapist gets found in month five, in a crisis, on a night when you finally admit this is more than adjustment. It is harder to get back on track from there. Not impossible, but harder, and lonelier than it needed to be.

If you are reading this and you have not moved yet, this is your permission to do it backwards: line up the therapist before the boxes. If you are already here and still standing, do it this week, while you are okay. Starting from steady is a very different experience from starting from the floor.

Where to start

If you are new to Chicago and looking for a therapist, meet our team. We are a group of clinicians with different specialties, backgrounds and life stories, and our whole approach is built on matching you with the right person rather than whoever has an opening. If you want a quick read on how the move is sitting with you first, our anxiety check-in takes three minutes.

Then book a free consultation. Fifteen minutes, no commitment. You tell us what brought you to Chicago and what has been hard, and we tell you honestly who on our team fits.

Welcome to the city. It gets better than the first three months, and you do not have to get there alone.

How to Find Your Values When You Feel Lost

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A mother and her young daughter touching noses and laughing at a kitchen table, white tulips in the foreground

It is Sunday evening and you are loading the dishwasher, and out of nowhere you think: is this it.

Nothing is wrong. That is the confusing part. The job is good, or good enough. The relationship is fine. You answered your emails, you went to the gym twice, you called your mother back. From the outside there is nothing to point at. And still there is a flatness sitting under all of it, like you are executing a life rather than living one.

That feeling is not a personality defect and it usually is not laziness. More often it is drift. You have been making reasonable decisions for a long time, one at a time, each of them defensible, and somewhere along the way the sum of them stopped adding up to something that feels like yours.

Values are the thing you steer by, not the thing you feel

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, usually shortened to ACT, treats values as chosen directions rather than accomplishments. A goal is a place you arrive and then cross off. A value is a direction you can move in today and tomorrow and for the next forty years without ever finishing it. I have written before about that distinction, and about what to do when nothing feels worth doing, which is the version of this problem that shows up alongside depression.

This piece is about the other version. You are functioning. You just cannot feel the thread.

And here is the thing worth saying plainly at the start, because it is where most people get this wrong. Knowing your values does not mean you stop having bad days. It does not make Sunday evening feel different. Knowing your direction does not improve the weather. What it does is tell you which way to walk while the weather is bad, which is a much smaller promise and a much more useful one.

Most people can name their values. That is not the problem

Ask almost anyone what matters to them and they will say family, honesty, health, growth. They are not lying. The list is usually accurate.

The problem is the distance between the list and the calendar.

This is the insight underneath one of the standard values measures in ACT research, the Valued Living Questionnaire, developed by Kelly Wilson and colleagues. It does not just ask how important something is to you. It asks that, and then separately asks how consistently you have actually lived that way recently. Two numbers, not one. The useful information is in the space between them.

So when you sit down to do this, do not just write a list. Take each area of your life and rate it twice. How much does this genuinely matter to me, one to ten. How much did my actual last month look like that, one to ten. Then look at where the two numbers are furthest apart.

That gap is not a verdict on your character. It is a map of where your attention has quietly gone somewhere else. And it is almost always more specific and more actionable than the vague feeling that something is off.

Your first list is probably a little bit wrong

Here is the part that takes some nerve.

When people write down their values, a portion of what lands on the page is not actually theirs. It is inherited. It is what a parent praised, what a manager rewarded, what a version of you at twenty-four decided you should care about, what the internet said a person like you cares about.

ACT takes this seriously enough to give it its own name. There is a difference between behavior that follows a value you have chosen and behavior that follows a rule you absorbed somewhere along the way, and the two feel identical from the inside. Both come with a sense of certainty. Both come with guilt when you deviate.

The place they separate is cost. A value you actually hold survives being expensive. A rule you absorbed tends to collapse the moment following it means someone is disappointed in you, because the whole point of the rule was avoiding that disappointment in the first place.

So run everything on your list through one question. Would I still want this if nobody ever knew I was doing it, and if honoring it meant letting somebody down.

Some things will survive that. Those are yours. The ones that do not survive it are not moral failures, they are just borrowed, and you are allowed to hand them back.

Then make it a verb, and make it small

A value written as a single word is still just a label. Ambition, honesty, presence: none of those tell you what to do on Tuesday.

The move that makes this real is rewriting each one as something you could be caught doing. Not “integrity” but “say the inconvenient true thing in the meeting.” Not “rest” but “stop before I am empty rather than after.” Not “presence” but “put the phone in the other room during dinner.”

Then pick the area with your widest gap and name one action in the next seven days, small enough that calling it a plan feels a little embarrassing. Not a new morning routine. One text message. One walk. One conversation you have been putting off for a month.

It also helps to name, honestly, what you do instead. Everyone has a reliable move for when the meaningful thing gets uncomfortable. Scrolling, tidying, extra work, a second glass of wine. Naming it in advance is not about shaming yourself. It is so you can recognize it in the moment, which is the only moment where recognizing it does any good.

The worksheet

We built the whole thing into a free worksheet so you do not have to hold it in your head. Five steps, a pen, and no advice about waking up at five. Take as long as you want with it. Tell us where to send it.

The honest part

Values work is clarifying and it is not a cure. You will have days where you know exactly what matters to you and do none of it. That is not a sign the exercise failed. That is being a person.

And if the honest answer to all of this is that you cannot get out of bed, that nothing has felt like anything for weeks, that the flatness is not a Sunday evening thing but a permanent weather system, then this worksheet is not step one. Talking to someone is. Our depression check-in takes about three minutes if you want a starting point.

But if you are functioning and something is off, this is a good use of a quiet hour and a pen. Getting clear on which way you actually want to face is not the whole answer. It is the thing that has to happen before the rest of it can.

And if you would rather do this with someone who can hear what you are not saying, our therapists in Chicago work this way, in person and online, and a first conversation is free.

Manifesting vs. Forcing: Finding the Balance

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Cup of coffee wrapped in a cozy blanket

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the difference between manifesting and forcing something. They often get confused, especially when you’re holding a strong vision. Manifesting isn’t just about wishing; it’s about building momentum, acting as if, and steadily working toward the small goals that move you closer to where you want to be.

But as I’ve been going through a major restructure in my business, I’ve been forced to pause and look inward. I’ve started asking myself: at what point are we trying to force things into existence instead of allowing them to naturally unfold?

For much of my life, I’ve treated things like a game-like Monopoly, with stations to reach, properties to acquire, and people who would help me get to the next step. It was survival-driven. But in doing that, I didn’t always stop to ask: am I forcing this? Or does it genuinely feel aligned?

What I’ve noticed as a leader is that the hardest decisions often carry a deeper message. Maybe they feel so heavy not because they’re necessary but because they’re not aligned with what’s meant to manifest. Just because I want something doesn’t mean the path I’ve chosen is the right one. Sometimes the vision is right, but the pace is off. Or the approach is off.

For me, this season is about pausing. Reflecting. Letting my own body, the interoception, that deep inner sensing be the guide. Because maybe the real balance lies there: in listening, in noticing whether I’m building from force or from flow.

The takeaway: therapy offers us that pause. It’s a space where we can notice when we’re pushing too hard, when we’re aligning with what’s authentic, and when it’s time to let go of the timeline we thought we had to follow. Therapy helps us reconnect with that inner compass so we can move forward with both intention and ease.

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