Therapy For the Tech Community | Simeon Simov, LMFT

Tech Community

For many, tech is more than a profession. It’s a culture and lifestyle which heavily influences their psyche. Aspects of the culture shaped by most companies have lots of wonderful benefits including material freedom, opportunities for connecting with like-minded colleagues, valuing professional growth and self-development. Moreover, many companies compete to hire as many engineers as they can, which results in increasingly high salaries, benefits and other incentives.

Despite all the advantages of working in this field , there are also drawbacks such as a culture of valuing worth based on productivity, lots of internal competition (especially at some of the top tech companies), and an environment which encourages a lobsided work-life balance.

Tech also attracts individuals who value logic, intellectualism, analytical thinking and an overall emphasis on using features of the “left-brain” when making decisions. Emotions are often undervalued or dismissed as unimportant. These are necessary qualities for great engineering and can be very helpful for making sense of many task-oriented problems in life.

Unfortunately, this mindset and belief system can also cause a variety of problems including lack of internal clarity, difficulty with inherently emotional tasks such as:

conflict resolution in relationships
inability to understand one’s true self and underlying motivations
unhealthy rumination also known as “overthinking”
intellectualization (trying to think or problem solve one’s way out of an inherently emotional or “feelings required” problem)
rationalization, finding “rational” reasons to explain something to avoid the underlying feeling

Often times, lobsided use of intellect and analytical thinking to deal with emotions can leave one with a vague but difficult to explain sense that “something is not right”. They can also lead to a variety of other symptoms such as addiction to substances, workaholism, difficulties with anger, relationship problems, loneliness, difficulty making decisions life decisions in which emotions a large role.

I grew up with parents who worked in big tech and I inherited many of its values. I’ve personally had to work through and resolve many of these same problems. This leaves me uniquely capable of relating to, empathizing, providing guidance and support to individuals within the tech community.

I believe that I can provide a direct, no-nonsense approach to therapy. Sometimes, this will mean addressing practical concerns and collaboratively coming up with tools and alternative ways of approaching work and life. Other times, this will mean educating and challenging you to make more room for the messy world of feelings, emotions and intuition, which will result in navigating life challenges with more clarity, relief and congruence.