What happened next surprised me. Getting better wasn’t enough. I needed to understand what had happened inside me.
Wanting to understand what had happened led me into the mental health field. I worked first in substance use treatment, then in residential programs with people living with co-occurring disorders, chronic pain, memory loss, cognitive impairment and complex mental health conditions. Today I’m a clinician in a residential program in Los Angeles, for people living with both a mental health condition and substance use.
In every setting, I saw the same thing. People were struggling, but not because they lacked insight. They were struggling because they couldn’t recognize what was happening in their bodies at the moment it mattered. They felt something real, and no one was teaching them to notice it, or what it meant.
As I trained as a clinician at Pepperdine and studied neuroscience, that became clearer. The people I saw make lasting change weren’t always the most motivated or the most self-aware. They were the ones who learned to notice their patterns as they happened. They learned to say:
“My chest feels tight. Part of me is expecting something bad.”
Before, they might have said:
“I’m anxious again. Something is wrong with me.”
The problem was access. That kind of awareness usually takes months of skilled therapy to build, and the people who need it most often can’t get that therapy.
Care like that is getting harder to get. Right now, insurance companies are denying coverage for the residential care people need, and they’re denying it quickly. People who need that care are going without it.
Not everything a residential program does can fit in a phone. But some of it can.
So I built Cathexis.
It’s based on how the brain makes sense of what you feel in your body. It brings what can travel: the questions a therapist asks at a first visit, the questionnaires clinics use, a short daily practice, and a way to work on one pattern in your real life, one step at a time. It helps you notice your patterns, understand what they mean to you, and practice responding differently while you’re still in the moment.
It doesn’t replace treatment. It’s for the time between visits, or for when treatment is out of reach.
Cathexis is the tool I wish I’d had at 19, when my nervous system was running patterns I couldn’t see.
And the goal I wrote into the business plan is for people to need the app less over time. The point isn’t to keep you using the app. It’s for you to understand your own patterns well enough that you need it less.
