My name is Dan Parker.
I'm a clinical social worker and psychotherapist.
If there was ever a time to roll up our sleeves and do the work, this is it.
I mean, this is like the Super Bowl for therapists.
It doesn't get any more important than this.
A world pandemic.
There's a lot of fear, uncertainty.
But what side of history did I want to be on?
What do I want to tell my kid or my
grandkids that I did during the great pandemic?
And I decided that I was going to accept
any patient that sought my help within reason.
My colleagues and I were pretty stoked in terms of, we can do this.
Let's do it. As soon as they gave us a green light to
be able to see clients via telehealth, we hit the ground running.
So there was some growing pains in the
beginning, but I think the proof's in the pudding.
Once they are able to get comfortable with
this type of medium, a lot of the clients have really, really excelled in it.
But it's been really hard, and we're no longer in the clinic.
You're in my house.
So I become more than just the therapist.
I become Dan the human.
And having to do psychotherapy when I have
my little seven year old running around behind me has been very hard.
You really can't have a little kid running behind you going, hey, Where's my iPad?
I want to play Roblox.
As you know, New York is a tough, tough
place to live, whether you're a native or not.
Let's put one thing in perspective.
The Lower East Side loves conspiracy theories.
Like, what is the pandemic?
Is it population control by China?
They're going to put microchips in the vaccines.
So a lot of people who had any type of
paranoid personality disorders really suffered in the beginning.
There's a large number of people who have suffered even more because of stagnation,
boredom, and an inability to engage in self care.
Talk about complexity.
To be able to kind of sift through the
nuances of a pandemic and the historical suffering that most of my clients have
dealt with their whole lives because they're non white, they were able to find
a space to talk about some of the racism and some of the marginalized suffering
that they had to deal with their entire lives on the Lower East Side.
So I think the dialogue opening up, even
in the midst of a pandemic, has been kind of healing in a way to get away from the
morose pandemic and into something that really really is important.
It's been refreshing for me to have that dialogue opened up and to really try to
listen and understand, because this is my calling.
I didn't get in to be a therapist, to be rich.
I'm here because I want to help.
The tenets of our self esteem keep me going.
I mean, the job I'm doing and my connection with my son.
I do practice self care though.
Like I tell all my clients to do and I do it too.
So I exercise every morning I eat as much fruit and veggies as I can every day.
I play guitar in between sessions for five minutes.
[Plays "Someday Soon" by Wilco.]