One of the most challenging aspects of therapy is the near-constant state of unease it triggers. Therapy isn’t intended to make you comfortable, it is intended to help you to grow and develop into someone better able to cope and rebound from the events of life. Although I find therapy to be enormously helpful in supporting my recovery and equipping me to embrace and engage with life, it is nonetheless mentally–and sometimes physically–exhausting. This week’s sessions have not been any more taxing than normal, but normal is pretty heavy in its own right.
One way that I recognize that I am evolving is that I am being more gentle with myself than I have in the past when faced with exhaustion. My typical response is to press forward until I collapse. This week, though, I have seen a turning point. I am modifying my days to allow for more rest and more time to reflect and center myself. Although these steps are small, they are important and needed progress.
As we head into the weekend (whatever that means in these times), I hope that you can find time for restoration and for seeking joy.
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
View all posts by liz
Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 