Jamal Zhang

About

I am a therapist for adults who have organized their lives around avoiding one specific thing. Dogs, needles, elevators, bridges, driving: the object varies and the architecture underneath is always the same. My work is built on graded exposure, which sounds alarming and is in practice the opposite: nothing happens that you have not agreed to in advance, in an order you helped design. We start well below the level that frightens you and move up only when the previous step has become boring. You will know what the next step is before we take it, and you can veto any of them. Boredom is the actual goal. I began in a school and university counseling setting, where I learned to explain things clearly to people who were skeptical of therapy. That habit stuck. I am not interested in surprising you, and most find the process far less frightening in practice than in prospect. If you have been quietly steering around something for years, reach out.