One reorg away from questioning everything:
Therapy for tech workers in Seattle
Nothing has actually happened yet, and that's the part that's so hard to explain to someone outside the industry. Your team is intact, your last review was fine, and yet you're living inside a low, continuous hum of this could end in April — because you've already watched it end in April for competent people sitting two desks over, twice.
That isn't catastrophizing, whatever anyone tells you. It's an accurate read of your environment, and it's exactly why generic anxiety advice tends to land so badly here: you're not distorting the risk or inventing it, you're carrying a real one, indefinitely, with no single action available that would resolve it.
I work with tech workers across the Seattle area. People at Amazon and Microsoft, at the mid-size companies, and at the startups, from an office in Edmonds and online across Washington State.
What comes up most
Layoff anxiety with no off switch. You reread Slack messages for their tone, do quiet arithmetic on your runway, read a canceled 1:1 as a signal about something larger, and perform a calm you don't feel for a team that's watching you for cues.
Review-cycle dread. Calibration, stack ranking, being force-curved against people you genuinely respect, systems built expressly to sort human beings against one another produce a very particular kind of anxiety, and it tends to be sharpest for anyone who arrived already convinced they had to be exceptional just to be tolerated.
Comparison as a background condition. Levels, total comp, who got promoted, who left for the AI company, the twenty-six-year-old staff engineer down the hall. Your own trajectory would look perfectly enviable to almost anyone outside this industry, which somehow does nothing at all for you. Layoff watchfulness, comparison, and the inability to log off tend to show up as one package rather than three separate problems.
Never quite logging off. Distributed teams, follow-the-sun on-call, a laptop that lives on the kitchen counter, the workday doesn't so much end as get gradually quieter, and that ambiguity is harder on a nervous system than a clean, hard finish would ever be.
An identity that's all job. You are your title, your level, your team, which is what turns a reorg into an existential event rather than a merely administrative one. If you're senior, that's the heart of therapy for executives.
Impostor feelings that survive every promotion. These are especially common if you're the first in your family to work in a field like this, or an immigrant on a visa where the job is also your immigration status, a pressure most of your colleagues cannot see and so tend to underestimate. See immigrant and first-generation therapy.
What therapy does about an actual, real risk
This is the fair objection, and I want to meet it honestly: the uncertainty is real, so what is therapy going to do about it?
It isn't going to talk you out of it, because reassurance here would be both false and useless. What we work on instead is what the uncertainty is costing you in the meantime, which turns out to be a substantial target in its own right:
Whether you're braced twenty-four hours a day for something with maybe a 15% chance of happening in the next year.
Whether your entire sense of worth is currently held by an employer who has demonstrated it doesn't reciprocate.
Whether you can do the concretely useful things (savings, network, options) without living inside them.
Whether you can be present at dinner while the situation remains unresolved.
Getting your identity to rest on more than one leg, so a reorg is a serious event rather than the end of you.
Some common questions
Do you work with people on visas?
Yes, and I want to name that pressure plainly, because it changes everything about how the job feels from the inside. When your immigration status runs through your employer, "just find another job" isn't a fallback with a few comfortable months of slack in it. It's a clock that's already running. That's a materially different situation from the one your colleagues are in, and treating your vigilance as an overreaction would be a genuine clinical mistake on my part.
Is this burnout, anxiety, or both?
Usually it's both, and the two tend to feed each other. If the dominant feature is depletion and a growing cynicism about work you used to care about, burnout therapy is the likely fit; if it's more about dread, disrupted sleep, and a mind that simply won't stop, then anxiety therapy is. Part of the early work is figuring out together which one is load-bearing for you.
If you've already tried the obvious remedy (a sabbatical, a long leave, four weeks between jobs) and found that it wore off within a couple of weeks of returning, that's diagnostic information rather than a failure on the holiday's part. Time off doesn't resolve burnout, because what's depleted was never the hours. The Edmonds office is close enough that coming in person is realistic if you'd like that, and far enough from campus that you're not going to run into your skip-level in the waiting room.
Why see someone here rather than through the EAP?
Use the EAP if it's what gets you through the door, six free sessions is not nothing, and I'd far rather you talk to someone than spend energy optimizing the choice.
There are two things worth knowing, though. The first is scope: EAP counseling is designed to be short and solution-focused, which suits a discrete, contained problem and suits this quite poorly, because the pattern you're bringing has a history and six sessions won't reach it. The second is that people worry about the employer connection, and while EAP notes really don't go to your manager, the discomfort of leaning on a benefit administered by the very company you're anxious about is real, and it's worth taking seriously rather than arguing yourself out of.
The practical middle path a lot of my clients end up taking is to use the EAP sessions for the immediate crunch, and then, if it becomes clear the thing is older than this particular job, to come here for the longer work. What to look for when you're choosing applies either way, and it's a perfectly fair set of questions to bring to me too, not only to someone else.
Do you understand how this industry works?
Enough that you won't spend your sessions explaining it to me first. I know what performance review cycles and stack ranking do to people, what a PIP means and what it usually precedes, and why an org change can be more destabilizing than an outright layoff. I understand vesting cliffs and the specific trap of golden handcuffs on a job you'd otherwise have left long ago, what being on call does to a week, and how a visa tied to employment quietly changes the arithmetic of every single decision.
I'm not an engineer and I won't pretend to be one. But you can walk in and say "I'm being managed out and my green card is tied to this job," and we can start there.
What happens next
You pick a time for us to meet directly on my calendar. Fifteen minutes, free, video or phone. You don't have to have the words ready or fill out long forms, I understand the first step can be difficult.
We meet virtually and talk about what's going on. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit, and if I'm not, I'll point you toward someone in my network who is.
If it feels right, we schedule your first full session, usually within a week. I see clients at my office in Edmonds on the waterfront, or virtually across Washington State.
