F*ck Off, 2025. Sincerely, a Psychotherapist.

Since 2026 began, I have been validating my clients’ realities by saying things like, “It’s okay if you are still hungover from 2025”, “So many of us are struggling from the post-holiday ‘funk’”, and “It’s okay if last year left you feeling resigned or checked out”. In the decade I have been a psychotherapist, I have never seen a single year bring my clients so much distress and uncertainty. 2025 felt like a barrage of attacks on so many levels, and many of my clients were left feeling dysregulated and terrorized.

Personally, my father was diagnosed with bladder cancer in March 2025, and this essentially laid the groundwork for how the rest of the year was going to be. It was hard for me to see any high points of last year. 2025 will not be a year that I will look back on with fondness and nostalgia. On Christmas, I even asked my father what his high points of 2025 were, and he could not think of any. This was quite telling given that he has a “glass half full” outlook on life.

When Trump was elected, he promised that he would fulfill all of the requirements of Project 2025. And he did just this—a direct attack on human rights, a “shock and awe” approach on the American people who already feel isolated, and an assertion of absolute power over anyone who is not heterosexual, white, cisgender, and Christian. I watched firsthand as a mental health professional that the general public became incensed, enraged, and frozen. I also began to see celebrities whom I have admired reveal themselves to be racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, and white supremacist. We also saw people whom we have known for years in our families and friend networks also reveal themselves to be on the wrong side of history. This was both traumatizing and disappointing.

2025 was an all-out travesty from a mental health perspective. And yet all of us who witnessed an internal attack on American civil rights watched with shock as we slowly began to find our internal strengths. All of us somehow had to keep going as we continued to pursue our goals and showed up for our families and communities. Despite the constant traumatizing news updates.

America is a very isolated country by design. Our culture emphasizes individualism and capitalism over helping others and collectivism. When you add anger and hatred to isolation, it is extremely dysregulating (regardless of what side of the political spectrum you are on). There is also a notion of “power over’ in this current administration versus “power between” and “power within”. Even more so, our bodies are under the most distress that they have ever been (more stress than living during the Great Depression, more stress than witnessing World War II, and more stress than the threat of nuclear attacks in the 1960’s). Adding all of these factors together makes for a lousy collective and systemic reality.

Yet, still. We found a way to survive. We did the best we could with what we had in front of us. I saw clients access their inner strengths that they did not realize were there, amidst systemic racism, ICE raids, the threat to gay marriage being banned federally, and so many other awful federal orders.

As we go into the next year as a collective, we will somehow continue to survive. We will continue to wade through the uncertainty of whatever the year will bring us. We will continue to access resources and inner strengths that we did not know we had within us. No one consents to being resilient, but in times like these, this very human component is needed as we continue to fight the good fight.