I kind of worked out recently that maybe if we didn't call what BetterHelp was doing necessarily psychotherapy, I might be able to be a bit more comfortable with it maybe. I still think it would be problematic, but I think it's the conflation of psychotherapy as I know it, and mental health support in a whole variety of different ways. So it could be, well, it is the fact that you have this platform that's offering something to people in the world of mental health, mental health professionals to speak to in some way or fashion. But the way that BetterHelp works is completely antithetical to how I was trained to offer a psychotherapeutic space, which was about consistency, regularity, space between those sessions. Generally very little contact between sessions, generally a commitment of more than a very short period of time...

The first thing that comes to mind is this degree of some kind of personal responsibility, regardless of disservices done in places we may want to blame or criticize or complain. At the end of the day, it kind of feels like I'm an agent in this body and I have so much ability to choose what I'm going to do with it, and fingers crossed, I do what's useful for myself and others....

Sometimes it's easy to forget how it felt before I got sober, but I think such a big part of it that, I didn't think of it in this way at the time, was that I was really cut off from other people. I mean, I had people in my life. I did have some support networks, but I think there were a lot of barriers that I had built up that made it difficult to connect with people. And even being in the recovery community or in different recovery communities, you hear a lot of people say, kind of just feeling like they were different or they never fit in, or you hear all these different ways of describing not feeling connected, not feeling a part of something bigger.