Why Does My Therapist Ask About My Job, Money, and Family?
Stomping Ground
Why Does My Therapist Keep Asking About
My Job, Family, Money, and Relationships?
The social work approach to therapy: why your life outside the therapy room matters
You came to therapy to talk about the anxiety or the marriage. So why does your therapist keep asking about your paycheck, your mother, your boss, your friendships?
The money
If you have skipped paying the phone bill so the water does not get shut off. If you have looked at a bill and cried. If you have opened your checking account more than once or thrice to find overdraft charges you cannot afford. If your student loan payment skyrocketed to a number that leaves you feeling hopeless and out of options.
Or maybe you are technically fine, and it looks like this instead: you somehow manage to avoid letting yourself enjoy anything you have worked hard for, because guilt gets there first. Then obstinance kicks in and you overspend, because why are you working if you are miserable or have nothing to show for it.
The family
If you have no support. If nobody ever tags in with your kids besides the other parent, so one of you is always exhausted. If you feel like you are failing your children, your family, whatever, because you grind yourself into the ground to make the money to survive, and that money is paid in relationships. And in the quiet that is left, intrusive thoughts get cozy without buying you dinner first.
The job
If you worked your ass off to get where you are, whatever that looked like, but you look back at the sacrifices and wonder whether the job became your identity and your worth. If you wrestle with short bursts of pride, few and far between. If your hands are a pass-through for compliments because you never know where to put them. If you know you are brilliant deep down, possibly your grandma’s voice or a keen teacher’s, residual, but that knowledge lives right next to the certainty that you have fooled everyone and will be exposed any minute.
The body
If you always thought grinding your teeth meant grinding them back and forth, then learned firsthand that side to side is one too. If you are a walking Pepto-Bismol commercial, pick one or collect them all: heartburn, ulcer, or gastric reflux? Constipation, diarrhea, or both? Vomiting, or just perpetual nausea? Eating your feelings. If you lie down to sleep only to realize you are Temu levitating off the bed, because every muscle in your body is tense.
The relationships
If you yearn for your partner but your body is already spoken for by exhaustion and defeat. If you have no energy left for the ones you love, and you get annoyed when they want your attention after a day of doing what everyone else wanted from you, and you give a halfhearted acknowledgment and then immediately feel like a piece of shit afterwards, because they are the reason you work.
Failure? Shame? Social media says let me count the ways. You are failing at your job. You are failing at relationships. Your body is failing. You are turning out to be the person you feared being most. There are tumbleweeds blowing through your social life. Your friendships are dormant, and resurrection would take a lot of effort, and then shortly you will be expected to do it again. Not biannually.
You watch weddings with twelve bridesmaids and wonder how anyone has that many people who would show up for them with fervor. There are not even twelve people who would buy cookie dough for the fundraiser. You have never had to figure out how to repurpose a bridesmaid dress for later.
When the advice does not fit your actual life
And the advice is free everywhere. Set boundaries. Save money. Leave the job. But how do you do boundaries with family who provide vital childcare? How do you save money when there is so little left at the end of the month? How do you ever get ahead? The job is stealing your soul, but jobs are scarce, you need the insurance, you cannot take a pay cut, people depend on you. The one thing that would improve your life has the capability of destroying it if the stars do not align. And many people gave up on stars long ago. Wishes in waiting.
You feel like you are failing while simultaneously doing more than anyone could sustain, more than anybody around you expects. But you can always do better.
You become enraged one minute, wanting to use your hands as drywall missiles or scream bloody murder or flip tables, then crash into feeling like you do not deserve the drywall or the tables, and you were naive to believe you did. You hope for the worst so you are not disappointed when things do not work out. You cannot imagine feeling the way you do for x amount longer, but you do, and you will.
Why your therapist keeps asking: the person-in-environment approach
Our environment serves up our reality. You can practice all the coping skills and still stay on the verge of dysregulation, waiting for your world to crash.
And the environment is not dealt evenly. Racism, poverty, immigration status, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia stack the deck before the first turn. Some people drew every setback card in the Candy Land pile before they got to move one block.
This is why your therapist keeps asking. Social workers are trained in person-in-environment: you cannot separate a person from the conditions they live inside, so therapy does not get to ignore the conditions. If you are wondering why social workers are therapists in the first place, Katana Jones breaks down the training, the licensure, and what social workers bring to the room in Redefining the Clipboard: Why Social Workers Make the Absolute Best Therapists. Your job, your family, your money, your relationships are not small talk before the real session starts. They are the session.
The questions are also how a therapist tells the difference between what is wrong with you and what is happening to you. Hopelessness with a real overdraft behind it is not the same clinical picture as hopelessness without one, and the work is different for each. That is not a hunch: researchers can watch depression and anxiety ease when financial pressure lifts. Without knowing about the job, the money, and the family, a therapist cannot tell how much of what you are carrying is disorder and how much is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation.
In sessions, folks often remark that they are just venting, or not talking about what they are supposed to be talking about, or wasting my time, or taking my time away from people who need it more. Those are the pieces that create our lives, and those are the pieces that fall apart, sometimes lost.
Therapy that accounts for the life you are actually living
Therapy cannot make your rent cheaper. It cannot manufacture childcare, make your boss reasonable, hand you a village, or put three more hours in the day. But it can stop pretending those things are irrelevant to why you are struggling.
Sometimes the work is coping differently. Sometimes it is grieving what cannot be changed, or figuring out which expectations were never reasonable in the first place, or finding one place where you do not have to prove you tried hard enough before you are allowed to say you are tired.
That is part of what social workers mean by person-in-environment. We are interested in what is happening inside you. We are also interested in what keeps happening to you, around you, and because of the systems you live inside.
Your therapist keeps asking about your job, your family, your money, your body, and your relationships because none of them are interruptions from your mental health. They are where your mental health has to live, and they get a vote in how you show up in that life.
If any of this is heavier than a blog post should carry, support exists right now: call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time.
If you read this and saw yourself, the clinicians at Ala Therapy Collective are accepting new clients.
Meet the Aviarytherapy for an expansive life
Shylah Ridgway, LCSW, LICSW is the founder of Ala Therapy Collective and a Board Approved Supervisor. Her practice focuses on immigration evaluations and LCSW supervision. She completed Georgia King’s immigration evaluation course and the Immigration Certificate Program through the Forensic Social Work Alliance (FSWA), and offers virtual evaluations with weekend availability.
