I didn’t want to be the therapist who hands people a binder of material and has a bunch of pamphlets sitting behind them.
I’m still in school, so I haven’t even become that therapist yet. Somehow, though, I’m already working on the binder. Mine happens to have a website and an app.
I can see the humor in this. I had an idea of the kind of therapist I didn’t want to become, and now I’m building resources I hope I might someday hand to a client. Maybe my objection wasn’t entirely to the pamphlets. It was to handing someone a stack of information and acting as if that took care of the person.
I had already worked through some of this in my book Empire, Nevada, although I didn’t necessarily understand what I was working through at the time.
Mr. Gammell is Paul’s school counselor. His first attempt to help isn’t especially impressive. Paul arrives upset and looking for answers about his friend Trish. A phone call interrupts, Gammell has a meeting, and Paul gets a depression flyer. From Paul’s side of the desk, it feels like being handed something generic when he needs somebody to understand what is happening to him.
But later, Paul finds the flyer again. The cheerful cartoon sun doesn’t suddenly make sense of his life. He doesn’t read a few words and become okay. He just isn’t ready to throw it away.
Later still, Gammell shows up at the hospital, helps make a visit from Trish possible, and reassures Paul that school is waiting for him when he’s ready. The useful part is not only the information. It’s also the person showing up and helping with something concrete.
I don’t want to rewrite my own book into a story about a pamphlet saving somebody. That isn’t what happens. What interests me is that something can feel inadequate when it first arrives and still be worth keeping. And a person can miss the mark at first without that being the end of what they have to offer.
That’s closer to what I hope I’m building now. Not a pile of answers. Something a person might find useful when they’re ready to look at it.
More Than a Running Game
The football analogy comes from something personal. When I played, I didn’t like playing offense because I didn’t trust the rest of the team or myself. If the quarterback got tackled or something bad happened, I would blame myself.
A lot happens on a football field. My mind could still turn the result into something I had done wrong.
I can see people getting into that kind of thinking in relationships. They’ve tried saying something different, asking for something, or changing the arrangement, and it went sideways. After enough of that, they turtle up. They stick to what they know. The status quo might not be particularly good, but at least they know how to get through it.
I don’t think that is always a lack of effort. Sometimes it’s what effort looks like after you’ve become afraid of its consequences.
It’s like having an offense built almost entirely around the running game. You aren’t particularly sure of your quarterback, but you know you can pound the ball forward. A little here. A little there. You can keep some momentum going.
Does it get you a touchdown? Who knows? But it gets you something, and sometimes something feels like all there can be.
I don’t want to tell that person to throw away the running game. It works to a degree. There may be good reasons they trust it. I want to think about what happens when they have more than that available.
The more tools you develop, the more plays you have to run. You may get better at noticing what is happening around you, too. What usually happens after this move? When does it help? When does it leave you stuck? Is there another response you could try without betting everything on it?
In a relationship, the other person isn’t an opposing team you need to defeat. It’s the recurring pattern I’m interested in. One person expects criticism, withdraws, and gets pursued more intensely. The other expects rejection, pushes harder, and gets more withdrawal. Each response helps produce the thing each person was already afraid of.
Knowing that doesn’t let you control somebody else. It may help you recognize where your own next move isn’t entirely predetermined.
The Swerve is about trying something different, sometimes something tiny, to see whether a different result is possible. Not because every new play will work. Not because a bad result proves you were wrong to try. The point is to have more available than the one response you’ve come to believe is your only option.
What Is Actually Available?
This is my developing theory of change, not a new clinical model I’ve discovered and validated. I’m studying marriage and family therapy, and I can see connections to the Narrative and Solution-Focused approaches I’m learning. Other people have spent a long time thinking about stories, patterns, strengths, and small changes. Giving my own understanding a name doesn’t mean I invented those things.
The name helps me bring together what I’m learning with what I’ve been trying to understand through my life and writing.
I keep coming back to a question: What is still possible here?
Not what should be possible if the world were fair. Not what somebody with more money, safety, health, or support could do. What is available to this person, in these circumstances?
People don’t create every condition they live under. Poverty isn’t a bad attitude. Illness isn’t a failure to imagine a better story. Discrimination doesn’t disappear because somebody learns to respond differently. Sometimes what needs to change is the condition itself, with practical help, resources, or people working together.
I don’t want agency to become another way of blaming somebody for being stuck. Limited control and no control aren’t always the same thing, but I don’t get to decide how much room another person has from outside their life.
Sometimes a possible change is large. Sometimes it’s finding a little more comfort. I keep returning to a pillow. If someone spends much of their life in bed, the right pillow might matter more than an elaborate conversation about reinventing themselves.
It doesn’t have to lead to a string of increasingly impressive achievements to count. A little less discomfort can be the whole point.
And sometimes the next useful thing is support, rest, or protection rather than another experiment. Having more options should include the option not to push harder today.
A Guide, Not the Owner
I want to help people see possibilities without deciding what their lives should become. That sounds reasonable until I consider how easily caring can turn into wanting a particular result.
I get invested. I see patterns, or think I do. I start imagining what could happen next. Then I have to be careful not to confuse my excitement about an idea with evidence that it’s the right idea for the other person.
Someone shouldn’t have to perform progress to keep me from being disappointed.
That is part of what I need to learn as I prepare for this work. Can I stay interested when somebody rejects an idea? Can I recognize that what looks like a small change to me may be a considerable risk to them? Can I notice when I’m trying to make their story come out the way I want it to?
I like the word guide, as long as it doesn’t mean I own the destination. I might help someone examine a pattern or notice an ability they’ve dismissed. They still get to decide whether a possibility fits, whether the timing is right, and what better would actually mean.
That also has to apply to anything I build. A resource shouldn’t become another authority telling somebody they’re doing their life wrong.
Why I’m Building MySwerve
That’s where MySwerve comes in, and why I keep posting all this crap that no one’s going to pay attention to.
I hope some of it will be useful at some point. It’s useful for me already, at least as a way to organize my thinking and make it concrete. Writing about possibility is one thing. Trying to build a resource around it makes me ask what somebody could actually do with the idea.
Can they name what’s weighing on them? Find information relevant to it? Consider a manageable next step? Keep track of what they tried and what happened, including when nothing improved?
That is more interesting to me than making another page that tells people change is possible and then leaves them to figure out the rest.
AI has done much of the technical work that has made this possible. I think what it can build is amazing. I’m not going to take credit as if I’m some great app creator who sat down and coded all of this himself.
The ideas, priorities, and lived experience I’m bringing matter. So do my decisions about what belongs in the resource and what I want it to do. That isn’t the same thing as having built every technical piece, and I don’t need to pretend it is.
I’m not expecting to become Mark Zuckerberg or some bullcrap like that. Everyone thinks they’re going to hit it big. I would be happy to have something functional and useful.
Eventually, when I’m qualified and working with clients, I would like to be able to offer a resource they can use between appointments. Something that helps them keep track of what they want to talk about, what they tried, what changed, and what still feels stuck. If checking in or sharing selected updates becomes part of that work, it would need clear agreements about privacy, how those updates are shared, and when they are reviewed.
That is a future hope, not what the app currently promises. Right now, the personal app is a local reflection tool, with entries stored in the user’s browser. They aren’t automatically sent to me. It isn’t a monitored therapist inbox, an emergency service, or a replacement for professional care. And I am still a student, not somebody offering treatment through an app.
The distinction matters. I want to make something useful, not give people the impression that somebody is watching over information no one is receiving.
The resource can still have a purpose without that connection. A person might use it to get their own thoughts in order or decide what they want to bring to a conversation. They might find one relevant question and ignore everything else. They might decide it isn’t useful for them. I want to leave room for that answer, too.
Even the Bundys Could Try Another Play
For a school assignment, I’ve been applying this developing framework to Al and Peggy Bundy from Married… with Children. Which is a ridiculous place to look for a theory of change, except sitcom characters are practically built for this problem. They have to keep repeating themselves or there isn’t a show next week.
Al feels used and unappreciated. Peggy feels unwanted and ignored. They keep responding to those feelings in ways that give the other person more evidence for their own complaint.
What interests me isn’t deciding which one is the problem. It’s asking what might become visible if their familiar responses weren’t the only ones available. What does each actually want? What happens during the occasional interaction that doesn’t become another insult? What could they try that wouldn’t require the other person to become entirely different first?
The first change doesn’t have to be a new marriage. It might be one conversation that doesn’t end in humiliation. Even that would give them something different to examine.
I wouldn’t get to decide that staying together was the required ending, either. The point would be helping them make choices they could actually recognize as their own, rather than assuming the next episode had already been written.
Useful, Even If It’s Mostly Useful to Me
I know putting something online doesn’t mean people will read it. Building an app doesn’t mean anyone needs it. I can spend time on this and still discover that parts of it aren’t useful, or that something I thought was clear doesn’t make sense to anybody else.
I would rather find that out than keep the whole thing in my head, where every idea can remain conveniently untested.
Writing makes me examine what I mean. Building makes me consider how an idea might be used. Putting it out there leaves open the possibility that somebody will encounter it when it means something to them, even if it didn’t mean much the first time.
That’s what brings me back to Paul keeping the flyer. Not a cure, not a promise, not evidence that I know how somebody else’s story turns out. Just something he wasn’t ready to throw away.
I’m not really against the binder. I’m against confusing the binder with the work. If I can make something worth returning to and keep learning how to be useful to the person holding it, that’s a reason to keep going.
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