The Therapist’s Wife  

TO protect my husband’s clients, I need to use a pen name for this article. Even here I need to have their needs front and center. That’s the nature of being the wife of a therapist.

My husband was a successful rebbi and mashgiach, and had a phenomenal ability to connect to people. When one day in his late forties he said, “Think I should go to social work school?” I actually thought it was a brilliant move.

I had very good knowledge of what it meant to be a client in therapy. I’d suffered from horrific anxiety, and therapy had done me a world of good. I knew my husband could offer compassionate treatment to others. It seemed like a really good idea.

Nobody prepared me for how challenging it would be to be a mother and employee all while having a husband in school. His program was rigorous, as it should be; he was in school, doing an internship, working part-time so that we didn’t starve, reading about 200 pages a week, writing reports….