 Nick Holt is a licensed clinical social worker and certified CBT therapist in West Los Angeles, CA. Picture a therapist seated behind a couch. A client staring at the ceiling, talking about childhood while someone nods and takes notes. Years of it, with no clear endpoint. That image sticks in our collective imagination when it comes to psychotherapy. But I haven’t experienced that as a therapy client in my life, and I certainly didn’t enter the field to provide this form of therapy.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is close to the opposite of that picture. And the gap between what most men imagine and what CBT actually is might be the only thing standing between them and getting some help. It Has a Point CBT is structured. We’re not wandering. While we may discuss your history and childhood may be a topic, the goal is to mutually agree on what’s actually driving the problem — the patterns of thinking and behavior that are running underneath whatever brought you in — and then work on it collaboratively and directly. You’ll usually know what we’re doing and why. That structure isn’t rigid, but it means your time isn’t being spent circling. You’re Not a Patient Being Analyzed CBT is collaborative. You’re not lying back while someone interprets you. You’re working alongside me on a problem, and your intelligence, practice and empowerment is an asset in that work — not something we have to get past. For men who are used to solving things, this tends to land better than open-ended exploration. It respects how you already operate. The Premise Is Simple Here’s the core idea: how you think shapes how you feel and what you do. Most of the time we’re not aware of the thinking — it runs automatically, built up over years, and we experience its output as just “how things are.” CBT slows that down. We look at the automatic thoughts and beliefs that are steering the ship, test whether they’re actually true, and adjust the ones that aren’t serving you. When the thinking shifts, the feeling and the behavior tend to follow. More times than not, situations are more complex than we label in our minds. You Arrive at It Yourself This part matters, and it’s where good CBT separates from the mechanical version. I’m not here to tell you what’s wrong with you. My job is to ask the right questions — the ones that slow you down long enough to notice something you’ve been moving too fast to see. The insight you reach on your own sticks in a way that someone else’s observation never quite does. That’s not a technicality. It’s the difference between being told something and actually knowing it. It Gives You Tools You Keep The goal of CBT isn’t to make you dependent on therapy. It’s to teach you to do this yourself. You walk away with actual tools — ways of catching a distorted thought, interrupting a pattern, responding differently under pressure — that keep working after our work together ends. Which brings me to the last point. It Ends I’m not interested in making you a lifelong client. Most CBT work is time-limited by design. We define what you’re here to work on, we work on it, and when you’ve got what you came for, you go live your life. That’s the whole point. Why the Credential Matters CBT is having a moment — which means a lot of therapists now list it as something they do. Not all CBT is the same. I’m a Diplomate of the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies, one of fewer than 750 in the world. That designation means my competence in the model has been reviewed and verified against peer standards. It’s not a line on a website. It’s the difference between someone who took a workshop and someone who has actually built their practice around this. If you’re in West Los Angeles — Sawtelle, Brentwood, Mar Vista, Westwood — and something here made more sense than the couch-and-ceiling version you’d been carrying around, that instinct is worth following. Free consultation. No pressure. Just a conversation to see if this fits. Nick Holt is an LCSW and A-CBT Diplomate in private practice on the Westside of Los Angeles. He has spent over a decade as a social worker serving LA County’s most forgotten and most impaired — the people the system failed repeatedly. He has also been a son watching his mother through a long and difficult end, a father, a surfer, a drummer, and someone who has broken his neck and come back from surgical repair of his shoulder. He works with men, caregivers, and high-functioning individuals who are ready to stop managing alone. Free consultations at nickholtlcsw.com.
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 Nick Holt is a licensed clinical social worker and certified CBT therapist in West Los Angeles, CA. Burnout has a reputation. The image most people carry is of an all-at-once moment — a point in time that sits you on your backside without warning. You're fine, and then you're not.
That version exists. But it's not the whole story. More often, burnout is something that festers. It nags. It creeps along slowly, building pressure underneath the surface, before it finally breaks through — if it breaks through at all. The quieter version never announces itself. It just gradually narrows your world until you realize, usually much later than you should have, that something essential has been gone for a long time. That's the version I want to talk about. Because it's the one that's harder to catch — and in my experience, the one that brings more people into a therapist's office than the dramatic collapse ever does. What quiet burnout actually feels like It doesn't feel like collapse. It feels more like distance. Things that used to matter don't land the same way. You get the promotion or finish the project or handle the crisis, and instead of satisfaction there's just — more. Another thing. Another expectation to meet. You find yourself going through motions you used to do with some investment, now just going through them. You're tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Not physically exhausted, necessarily. More like your reserve tank has been empty for so long you've forgotten what it felt like to have one. And here's the part that makes quiet burnout so easy to miss: the people experiencing it are usually the last ones to name it. Because they're still functioning. Because they've built an identity around being capable. Because admitting that something's wrong feels like a failure of the very thing they've always been good at. By the time it becomes visible — to them or to anyone else — it's usually been building for months. Sometimes years. The thought patterns that keep it going This is where CBT becomes useful — not as a productivity hack or a reframing exercise, but as a way to understand what's actually maintaining the burnout underneath the surface. Because quiet burnout isn't just stress. It's usually a set of deeply held beliefs doing the work: “I’ll rest when this is over.” The problem is that 'this' never ends. There's always another phase, another crunch, another person who needs something. The rest keeps getting pushed to a future that doesn't arrive. “Other people have it harder.” True and irrelevant. Comparative suffering doesn't make your experience less real. It just makes it harder to take seriously. “If I slow down, things will fall apart.” This one is worth examining carefully. Sometimes it's true. Often it's a belief that's been tested much less than it feels like it has. “I chose this. I shouldn’t complain.” Choosing something — a career, a family, a responsibility — doesn't mean you're immune to its weight. The two things aren't in conflict. These aren't character flaws. They're thinking patterns that made sense at some point — that might have even served you well — and now they're running on autopilot, keeping you locked into a pace you didn't consciously decide to maintain. One of the things that makes quiet burnout so persistent is that these patterns are self-reinforcing. You push through, things hold together, and the belief that you have to keep pushing gets stronger. The cost is invisible until it isn't. Who this tends to affect In my practice, quiet burnout shows up most often in people who are good at managing. High-functioning professionals. Men who have built an identity around being the person others can rely on. Caregivers who have organized their lives around someone else's needs for so long that their own needs have become genuinely hard to identify. I've also seen it in people who work in demanding systems — healthcare, public service, social work — where the expectation of absorbing stress is baked into the job description. People who got into the work because they cared, and who have been running on that care for long enough that they've stopped being able to tell whether there's anything left. The common thread isn't weakness. It's the opposite. It's people who are exceptionally good at pushing through, at reading what's needed, at performing competence — and who have been doing it for long enough that the performance has become invisible even to themselves. If you recognize yourself in any of that, that recognition is worth paying attention to. What actually helps Rest helps, but rest alone isn't usually enough. If the thought patterns driving the burnout don't change, the rest is just a pause before the same cycle resumes. Most people who've been burning out quietly for a long time already know this — they've taken the vacation, slept the extra hours, done the thing that was supposed to help. And then gone right back. What tends to help more is getting specific about what's actually happening — which beliefs are running the show, where the demands are coming from, what you're actually afraid would happen if you stopped. That's slower work than a vacation, but it's the kind that doesn't require you to keep repeating it. CBT is well-suited to this because it's concrete. It gives you a framework for examining what's going on rather than just managing your way through it. The goal isn't to think positively. It's to think accurately — which sometimes means recognizing that you've been running a harder race than you've been giving yourself credit for. A note on asking for help One of the more reliable signs of quiet burnout is that asking for help feels disproportionately hard. Not because the person doesn't know help exists. Because the identity built around competence makes needing it feel like a contradiction. It isn't. Needing support and being capable are not in conflict. But if that's a belief that's genuinely hard to hold, it's worth looking at — because that belief, more than the workload itself, is often what's keeping people stuck. The other thing worth saying: quiet burnout tends to be caught late precisely because the people experiencing it are so good at functioning. By the time it's visible enough to name, it's usually been building for a long time. Earlier is better. Not because there's an urgency to pathologize normal exhaustion, but because the longer those patterns run unchallenged, the more they become the default setting. If something here resonated, that's usually a signal worth trusting. I work with people navigating exactly this in my Sawtelle office in West Los Angeles. Free consultation available — reach out when you're ready. Nick Holt is an LCSW and A-CBT Diplomate in private practice on the Westside of Los Angeles. He has spent over a decade as a social worker serving LA County’s most forgotten and most impaired — the people the system failed repeatedly. He has also been a son watching his mother through a long and difficult end, a father, a surfer, a drummer, and someone who has broken his neck and come back from surgical repair of his shoulder. He knows what it takes to keep moving. He also knows what it costs to never stop. Carving out space for his own psychotherapy has been critical to his growth — not as a therapist, but as a person. He works with men, caregivers, and high-functioning individuals who are ready to do the same. Free consultations at nickholtlcsw.com.  Nick Holt is a licensed clinical social worker and certified CBT therapist in West Los Angeles, CA. You’ve recommended therapy to at least one person in your life. Maybe more. You saw what they were carrying and you said, without hesitation, that talking to someone would help.
You meant it. You were probably right. And yet here you are. The most common reason high-functioning men don’t get help isn’t that they don’t believe in therapy. It’s that they’ve quietly exempted themselves from needing it. The argument usually goes something like this: Things are hard, but I’m managing. Other people have it worse. I’m not in crisis. I know what my issues are. I just need to push through. Every part of that can be true and still be a problem. The Heroes Myth I spent years working with veterans. The ones who hadn’t served abroad would tell me: I don’t need help — take care of the guys who were actually deployed. The deployed veterans would say: I was in support — help the guys who were out on the FOB. The guys on the FOB would say: I’m no hero, help the special ops guys — those are the real heroes. And when I met with special ops, they’d say: I’m no hero. The only real heroes are in the ground. The exemption logic doesn’t stop. It just keeps finding someone more deserving until there’s no one left. Most men who don’t seek help aren’t using the word “hero.” But the structure is identical. There’s always someone who had it harder, sacrificed more, has a better reason to struggle. You will never be the person who qualifies enough. That bar doesn’t exist — it just keeps moving. The question was never whether someone else has it worse. It’s what staying the same is costing you. Being Good at Things Isn’t the Same as Being Okay Competence is convincing. If you’re reliable at work, present for the people around you, and good at holding it together under pressure — that looks like evidence that nothing is wrong. It isn’t. For a lot of men, that performance is exactly the thing that needs examining. Not because it’s fake, but because it’s exhausting, and because somewhere underneath it is a person who’s been running on empty for longer than he’d admit. You Take Care of Others. That Exempts You from Nothing. Men who carry responsibility for other people — as fathers, partners, professionals, caretakers — often develop an implicit belief that needing help is for the people they help. They’re the ones who hold things together. Needing support feels like a category error. It isn’t. It’s just what you’ve told yourself long enough that it stopped feeling like a story and started feeling like a fact. Understanding Isn’t Changing This one is specific to men who are smart and self-aware — which is most of the men who end up in my office. They’ve read the books. They know their patterns. They can describe their childhood and its likely effects with impressive clinical detachment. And they’re still doing the same things they’ve always done. Insight is not the same as change. Knowing why you avoid something doesn’t make you stop avoiding it. That’s not a character flaw — it’s how behavior actually works. The knowing and the changing are different problems, and one doesn’t automatically solve the other. If any of this is landing, it’s probably not because your situation is unique. It’s because these patterns are remarkably consistent — in men who are otherwise very different from each other. Which is the point. You don’t need to be in crisis to deserve help. You just have to be tired of things staying the same. Nick Holt is an LCSW and A-CBT Diplomate in private practice on the Westside of Los Angeles. He has spent over a decade as a social worker serving LA County’s most forgotten and most impaired — the people the system failed repeatedly. He has also been a son watching his mother through a long and difficult end, a father, a surfer, a drummer, and someone who has broken his neck and come back from surgical repair of his shoulder. He knows what it takes to keep moving. He also knows what it costs to never stop. Carving out space for his own psychotherapy has been critical to his growth — not as a therapist, but as a person. He works with men, caregivers, and high-functioning individuals who are ready to do the same. Free consultations at nickholtlcsw.com.  Nick Holt is a licensed clinical social worker and certified CBT therapist in West Los Angeles, CA. Most men don't spend a lot of time thinking about what they want in a therapist. They spend time talking themselves into going at all. By the time they're actually searching, they're exhausted before they've started — scrolling through Psychology Today headshots, reading the same paragraph over and over in slightly different fonts.
So here's a more useful framing: you're not looking for someone who seems nice. You're looking for someone who can actually help. Those aren't always the same thing. Credentials matter more than you think Therapy in California is a licensed profession, but the licenses aren't equivalent. LCSWs, MFTs, and psychologists all have different training backgrounds. Within those categories, there's enormous variation in how much clinical experience someone actually has. Look for post-graduate training in a specific modality — not just a license. A therapist who has completed formal training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, for example, is operating from an evidence base. That matters if you're someone who wants to understand why something works, not just whether it feels good in the room. Diplomate status in CBT — granted by the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies — means a therapist has met peer-reviewed standards for clinical competence in the model. There are fewer than 750 A-CBT Diplomates in the world. It's not a vanity credential. Look for directness, not warmth theater A lot of men tolerate therapy rather than benefit from it because they end up with a therapist who mistakes empathy for passivity. Nodding is not treatment. Reflecting your feelings back at you indefinitely is not a plan. What you want is a therapist who asks the right questions. Not leading questions with an answer already baked in — but questions that slow you down long enough to notice something you've been moving too fast to see. The insight you arrive at yourself sticks in a way that someone else's observation never quite does. A good therapist knows this. They're not withholding their opinion to be coy. They're creating the conditions for you to do the actual work. Warmth and directness aren't opposites. The best therapists have both. But if you're someone who operates in high-stakes environments, you'll disengage quickly from a therapist who seems afraid to name what's happening in the room — even if the naming comes in the form of a question rather than a verdict. The male therapist question Some men prefer working with a male therapist. Some don't. Neither preference is wrong. What I'd push back on is the assumption that gender is the primary variable. A male therapist who is conflict-avoidant or overly supportive isn't going to serve you better than a skilled female therapist who challenges you. That said — if you've been performing competence your whole life and the idea of being vulnerable in front of a woman feels like one obstacle too many right now, that's legitimate. Work with what actually gets you in the room. Practical over processing If you're high-functioning — good at your job, reliable to the people around you, privately exhausted — you probably don't need someone to validate how hard things are. You need someone who can help you change what isn't working. CBT-based therapy is structured, collaborative, and focused on building skills you can use outside the session. It's not about reliving your childhood indefinitely. It's about understanding the patterns that are running your behavior and having tools to interrupt them. For men who feel skeptical of therapy as a concept, this model tends to land better than open-ended exploratory work — because it respects your intelligence and your time. Location and logistics If you're in West Los Angeles — Sawtelle, Brentwood, Mar Vista, Westwood — you have options. But "options" in LA therapy often means a 45-minute drive each way, which is a reliable way to cancel on yourself after two sessions. Look for someone within a reasonable distance of where you actually live or work. Telehealth is available and useful, but for the kind of deep work that actually changes things, in-person has advantages. The session you show up to physically is the session you're less likely to phone in. What to do with the free consultation Most therapists offer a free 15-30 minute consultation. Use it to notice how you feel in the conversation — not whether you like the person, but whether you feel like they're paying attention to you specifically, not just running a script. Ask them directly about their approach. If they can't describe it clearly, that's information. You don't owe anyone a second session if the fit isn't right. Nick Holt is an LCSW and A-CBT Diplomate in private practice on the Westside of Los Angeles. He has spent over a decade as a social worker serving LA County's most forgotten and most impaired — the people the system failed repeatedly. He has also been a son watching his mother through a long and difficult end, a father, a surfer, a drummer, and someone who has broken his neck and come back from surgical repair of his shoulder. He knows what it takes to keep moving. He also knows what it costs to never stop. Carving out space for his own psychotherapy has been critical to his growth — not as a therapist, but as a person. He works with men, caregivers, and high-functioning individuals who are ready to do the same. Free consultations at nickholtlcsw.com.  Finding a therapist is hard. Finding the right therapist in West Los Angeles is harder.
Most people searching for psychotherapy in 90025 look at credentials. Degrees, licenses, certifications, years of experience. These things matter. They're the floor — the minimum standard that tells you someone is qualified to be in the room. But they don't tell you what you actually need to know. In over a decade of clinical work — in some of the most demanding environments in Los Angeles — I've come to believe that what makes a therapist truly effective has very little to do with their resume. It has everything to do with who they are. If you're searching for a therapist in West Los Angeles, Sawtelle, Brentwood, Santa Monica, or the surrounding Westside — here's what I'd look for. They can hold complexity without resolving it prematurely. Life is complicated. People are contradictory. The same person can love someone deeply and resent them completely. Can want to change and be terrified of it. Can know exactly what they should do and be completely unable to do it. A good psychotherapist in West Los Angeles doesn't rush past that. They don't smooth it over with reframes or tidy it up with techniques. They sit in the mess with you until something real emerges. If your therapist makes everything feel too simple too quickly — that's worth noticing. They've done their own work. The most effective therapists I know aren't the ones who had the easiest lives. They're the ones who had difficult lives and did something honest with that difficulty. Who went to therapy themselves. Who know what it feels like to sit on the other side of the room. That history — when it's been examined, metabolized, understood — becomes a clinical tool. It creates access. It creates genuine empathy rather than performed empathy. You can feel the difference. And when you're searching for therapy in 90025, that difference matters. They make you feel found, not just heard. There's a distinction that matters enormously in psychotherapy. Being heard means someone listened and reflected back what you said. Being found means someone saw something true about you that you hadn't fully seen yourself. The right West Los Angeles therapist does the latter. Not by being clever or interpretive — but by being genuinely present. By caring enough to pay real attention. If you leave sessions feeling processed rather than understood, trust that instinct. They're honest with you. Not brutal. Not confrontational for its own sake. But willing to say the true thing when the true thing is what you need. Therapy in West Los Angeles that only validates is comfortable but limited. Growth requires someone who respects you enough to push back. To name the pattern you keep avoiding. To sit with you in the thing you most want to look away from. The right therapist is warm and direct. Both at once. They're imperfect — and they'll own it. Not every intervention will land. Not every observation will be helpful. Sometimes a therapist will misread a moment, miss something important, or say the wrong thing at the wrong time. What matters is what happens next. A therapist who can acknowledge a misstep — who can say "I got that wrong" or "I missed something there" — is modeling something your nervous system has probably been waiting a long time to see. That repair is possible. That honesty doesn't end relationships. That accountability doesn't require shame. That moment of rupture and repair in the therapy room isn't a failure. It's often where the deepest work happens. If your therapist is never wrong, never uncertain, never willing to revisit something — that's worth noticing too. They know their own limitations. A therapist who is right for everyone is right for no one. The best clinicians in West Los Angeles know who they work well with, what they're genuinely skilled at, and when someone would be better served elsewhere. They'll tell you that honestly — and help you find a better fit if needed. That's not a weakness. That's integrity. They understand that the relationship is the therapy. Techniques matter. Evidence based approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy have real power. CBT in particular — structured, practical, and solution focused — is one of the most researched and effective modalities available. But decades of research point to the same conclusion — the quality of the therapeutic relationship predicts outcomes more than any specific modality. What happens between two people in that room, the safety, the honesty, the genuine human connection — that's where change actually occurs. The right therapist knows this. They invest in the relationship first. Everything else follows. They know their own capacity — and they're honest about it. This one rarely gets talked about in conversations about finding a psychotherapist in West Los Angeles. But it matters enormously. A therapist who is overextended, burned out, or carrying unprocessed weight of their own cannot be fully present for you. The ethical responsibility of this work demands that clinicians know not just their clinical limitations — but their human ones. I've been intentional about this in my own practice. For extended periods I've chosen to limit or pause private practice entirely — not because the work isn't meaningful, but because I hold a demanding full-time clinical role and have a family that deserves my presence. Taking on clients when I cannot give them what they deserve isn't ambition. It's a disservice. The right therapist asks themselves honestly — not just "am I qualified for this?" but "am I in a position right now to show up fully for this person?" That question requires self awareness that goes beyond training. It requires humility. And it requires valuing the client's wellbeing above the clinician's ego or income. When I do take private clients, I take very few. Intentionally. Because I'd rather work with a small number of people with my full presence than fill a caseload I can't adequately serve. That's not a limitation I apologize for. It's an ethical commitment I'm proud of. If you're evaluating a therapist, it's worth asking — how full is your caseload? How do you monitor your own wellbeing? What do you do when you're not okay? A therapist who can answer those questions honestly is someone worth trusting with yours. So how do you find this person? Trust your instincts in the first session. Not whether it was comfortable — growth rarely is. But whether you felt genuinely seen. Whether the therapist across from you was actually present. Whether something in you relaxed slightly, even in the difficulty. That feeling is data. The right Los Angeles therapist won't feel like a perfect fit immediately. But they'll feel real. And real is where the work begins. If you're looking for psychotherapy in West Los Angeles, Sawtelle, Brentwood, Santa Monica, or the 90025 area — and something in this resonates — I'd invite you to reach out. A free consultation costs nothing but a conversation. Sometimes that's where it starts. Nick Holt is an LCSW and A-CBT Diplomate in private practice on the Westside of Los Angeles. He has spent over a decade as a social worker serving LA County's most forgotten and most impaired — the people the system failed repeatedly. He has also been a son watching his mother through a long and difficult end, a father, a surfer, a drummer, and someone who has broken his neck and come back from surgical repair of his shoulder. He knows what it takes to keep moving. He also knows what it costs to never stop. Carving out space for his own psychotherapy has been critical to his growth — not as a therapist, but as a person. He works with men, caregivers, and high-functioning individuals who are ready to do the same. Free consultations at nickholtlcsw.com.
I had the honor of joining OKOP Show to talk about psychotherapy — what it actually looks like to work with a therapist, what gets in the way, and some of my own experiences in my work in West Los Angeles therapy practice.
Nick Holt, LCSW joins OKStorytime YouTube Live Stream to discuss his West Los Angeles Psychotherapy practice
Nick Holt is a licensed clinical social worker and certified CBT therapist in West Los Angeles, CA. He works with men, caregivers, and high-functioning professionals in the Sawtelle neighborhood. Evening and weekend appointments available. Contact him today.
Nick Holt, LCSW, BCD CBT Therapist | West Los Angeles, CA 90025 310.439.9144 nickholtlcsw.com There's a particular kind of person I enjoy seeing in my West Los Angeles practice. They're successful by every external measure — career on track, relationships intact, responsibilities handled. They're the person other people lean on.
And they're exhausted. Not in a way anyone around them would notice. They're too good at managing for that. But something isn't working anymore, and they know it — which is usually why they've finally ended up looking for a therapist. The problem with being capable: High-functioning men are often the last people to ask for help. Not because they don't need it, but because they've built an identity around not needing it. Competence becomes a trap. The same qualities that make someone effective in the world — self-reliance, stoicism, the ability to push through — can make it genuinely difficult to acknowledge when something is wrong. I've seen this pattern repeatedly since entering the field in 2009. The men who are hardest to reach are often the ones who need support the most. Not because they're broken, but because they've been performing wellness for so long they've forgotten what it actually feels like. What CBT offers that other approaches don't: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works particularly well for high-functioning people because it's honest and practical. It doesn't ask you to dwell indefinitely on your past or reframe your way out of real pain. It asks you to examine how your mind is working — specifically, the thought patterns that are keeping you stuck — and to build more effective responses. For men who value directness and measurable progress, that structure is often a relief. It feels less like being analyzed and more like doing actual work. The question worth sitting with: If you're someone who handles everything, who keeps it together, who nobody would ever describe as struggling — when was the last time you asked yourself how you're actually doing? Not performing. Not managing. Actually doing. If you're not sure, that might be worth paying attention to. Nick Holt is a licensed clinical social worker and certified CBT therapist in West Los Angeles, CA. He works with men, caregivers, and high-functioning professionals in the Sawtelle neighborhood. Evening and weekend appointments available. Contact him today.  The Westside of Los Angeles is a beautiful place to live. I am grateful for that. 2019 brings many of the challenges from 2018 with it, but also a number of positive developments.
I am honored to report my private psychotherapy practice in West Los Angeles, CA 90025 is FULL as I've received 10+ referrals since late December. I have started a waiting list but I continue to support individuals in linking to other certified Cognitive Behavioral Therapy practitioners, and other services most appropriate to their situation, in the area. My heart is full with appreciation to those reaching out for support. I fully recognize and connect with the privilege of supporting individuals during immense moments of vulnerability and honesty. I also grasp the tremendous disappointment in contacting someone in hopes of developing a therapeutic alliance and learning of their unavailability. This is why I think it is vital to post this update. I think the recent amount of referrals is reflective of the time of history we are in, the impact of our stressful and complicated lives, and the demonstrated inner strength, curiosity and empowerment of those reaching out. My hope is that it is also a symbol of decreased stigma in seeking out support for what each of us experiences in our respective journeys. I truly believe mental health symptoms are part of our unique humanity, and therefore the significance is not 'if' we are having challenges but 'how' we are attending to ourselves. May you keep pushing in 2019 for consistency, contentment and compassion in your support for yourself, loved ones, colleagues and acquaintances. I wish you success in your maintenance of the self-discipline and commitment required to continue your exercise, diet, relationship and routine goals. May we continue to replenish ourselves and radiate our emotional energy outwards to others. Here last year's New Year post. I still feel similar. If it's possible, maybe a bit more grateful -- https://goo.gl/BgMYPe I am honored to have been accepted into the American Board of Examiners in Clinical Social Work (ABECSW) as a Board Certified Diplomate (BCD) as of September 27th, 2018. According to the ABECSW, the BCD is: The Board Certified Diplomate in Clinical Social Work (BCD) certification is a national hallmark of quality practice, recognized by insurers, professionals, healthcare companies, courts, and consumers. The BCD is issued by the American Board of Examiners (ABE) to those who can demonstrate their ability to practice advanced-generalist clinical social work at a high level of competency.  Nick Holt, LCSW, BCD provides psychotherapy in West Los Angeles, CA 90025 #psychotherapy #psychotherapist #westlosangeles #lcsw #boardcertifieddiplomate #bcd
R.I.P. to the Dearly Departed. Your Shadow Will Always Cast Down Upon Us
The recent celebrity suicides have hit me pretty hard especially as someone who has lost to suicide.
I connect to those left behind. When we have losses like this, for me, suicide loss acts as a cheese grater on my soul, slowly peeling back my own layers of grief. I imagine what those left behind face and are enduring, and, no matter how hard I try to forget, the losses always bring back memories, thoughts and feelings of those I've loved and lost to suicide. In my time at Didi Hirsch's Suicide Prevention Hotline, I remember staff would talk about call volume spiking, and the need for more counselors to come in to support the many callers who connected to the recent celebrity suicides. These deaths, and the media coverage of the events, always reminds us of our own and others pain. If you are someone who is struggling with suicidal thoughts, depression or has lost someone to suicide, this will be a difficult time. Please treat yourself well. Reach out to a friend, a loved one. Take that walk or extra time in the gym. Be gentle and kind to one another. It is a good time to invest in ourselves. If you need additional supports, I've included the below from my depression and suicide webpage as a reminder of resources for you during this difficult time. If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or planning to kill yourself, PLEASE take a moment, a breath and remember that if you can delay suicidal impulse, research shows the impulses WILL decrease. There are some incredible volunteers and paid staff that would love to talk with you about what you are struggling with. Please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline (1-800-273-8255). From my website: Losing a loved one, family member, friend or even an acquaintance can be devastating. The feelings are complex, the thoughts overwhelming. Everything seems to trigger memories of the person gone, and all memories seem tainted by the nature of death. The process of losing someone can make us feel alone. Grief, loss and bereavement are incredibly difficult things to experience, but there are many amazing people and organizations out there for support: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's I've Lost Someone American Association of Suicidology's Suicide Loss Survivors West Los Angeles-based Didi Hirsch's Survivors After Suicide are great places to start. #suicide #prevention #call #celebrity #support #suicidal #ideation #intent #empathy #love #connection |
Nick HoltMental Health and Therapy Writer. As featured on Huffington Post, Vox Media and elsewhere. Archives
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