\u201cPolitics comes up every day in my practice,\u201d Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist in New York and Washington, D.C., said. \u201cFor some, it\u2019s Mamdani or Cuomo. For many, it\u2019s Trump. I\u2019ve had people begin sessions with a kind of ritual rant, unloading the latest headline before we\u2019ve even started.\u201d Every therapist I spoke with mentioned their patients\u2019 tendency to doomscroll, and to bring up specific articles and social-media posts that have agitated them. (One therapist said that some of her patients have fixated on YouTube videos of Mamdani\u2019s early rap career, finding them \u201cvery upsetting.\u201d \u201cThey\u2019ll say, \u2018Have you heard about this? Did you see this? This rap video where he\u2019s saying that he\u2019s in alignment with Hamas?\u2019\u00a0\u201d)<\/p>\n
Naturally, these anxieties peak around the time of an election. Jessica January Behr, a licensed psychologist, and the founder and director of Behr Psychology, a practice on the Upper West Side, said that, most of the time, her work is exciting\u2014or, at the very least, unpredictable. \u201cYou never know what people are going to come in and talk about,\u201d she said. \u201cEvery hour is totally different.\u201d But then an election happens. \u201cIt\u2019s a rough week of work for us,\u201d she explained. \u201cIt\u2019s, like, \u2018Oh, God, I\u2019m about to sit through four days of eight hours of everybody talking about the election.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Post-election, it\u2019s also common for patients to book extra appointments, coming in twice in one week, Schreyer-Hoffman said.<\/p>\n
Part of what\u2019s exhausting about these political discussions is that they\u2019re mostly one-sided, as is the nature of therapy. \u201cIt\u2019s not really a conversation, right?\u201d Behr said. \u201cYou\u2019re in a different position as a therapist.\u201d The result, she said, is a \u201cwhiplash of projections,\u201d with patients often assuming that their therapists are in complete agreement with them. Many patients have even begun requesting therapists who have a certain worldview. A recent example of a referral, from a therapist Listserv: \u201cIdeally therapist is Palestinian, but someone aligned with anti-Zionist values could also be a good fit.\u201d Another person, searching for a therapist on behalf of their friend, wrote, \u201cThey are only interested in working with someone who identifies as a Republican and is willing to self-disclose about that.\u201d (The person added that it was O.K. for the therapist to be out-of-network.)<\/p>\n
Most of the therapists I spoke with said that they take pains to maintain neutrality, even when they actively disagree with what their clients are saying. Alpert takes a different approach: \u201cI always push back,\u201d he told me. \u201cMy job isn\u2019t to agree with patients; it\u2019s to hold up a mirror.\u201d He added, \u201cTherapy, when done right, should be one of the few places left where people can safely confront disagreement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the summer, a patient came into Alpert\u2019s office in Manhattan, after witnessing an assault outside her apartment. \u201cThis is why we need Mamdani,\u201d she told Alpert\u2014who then went on to write an op-ed<\/a> for the Wall Street Journal about how misguided her thinking was. He argued that Mamdani\u2019s public-safety plan, which involves reducing the role of the police and hiring more social workers, would actually contribute to the kind of urban decline that his patient was concerned about. (Schreyer-Hoffman said that crime has become a frequent subject of her sessions, as well: \u201cSo many of our patients have had something happen in the street,\u201d she said. \u201cA lot of them feel very unsafe\u2014people who are active users of the subway, who walk around a lot, who have seen the homeless population explode.\u201d)<\/p>\n In his article, Alpert likened Mamdani to a bad therapist\u2014one who offers people comfort rather than actual solutions. (This is notwithstanding the fact that Mamdani\u2019s main appeal<\/a> is his solutions-oriented approach: freeze the rent, make buses free<\/a>, provide universal child care.) Alpert said that he\u2019s seen people across the political spectrum consumed with rage in the past several years. \u201cSome of it borders on homicidal,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve had patients in their twenties and in their seventies openly wish for Trump\u2019s death.\u201d Alpert, who has appeared as a commentator on Fox News, says he\u2019s lost patients for pushing back during sessions. \u201cSome people don\u2019t want therapy,\u201d he told me. \u201cThey want affirmation of their politics.\u201d Along those lines, sometimes patients seek validation for their individual choices: \u201cThey\u2019ll ask, \u2018Should I vote for Mamdani even though his policies scare me?\u2019 or \u2018Would voting for Sliwa make me a bad person?\u2019 What they\u2019re really asking is, \u2018Can you reassure me that my anxiety means I\u2019m morally right?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cPolitics comes up every day in my practice,\u201d Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist in New York and Washington, D.C.,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":354902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,1736,8988,405,403,85824,5226,5225,5228,5227,82013,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-354901","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-anxiety","10":"tag-election","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-yorkers","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-politcs","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115491264092212185","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}