Why I Believe in Meeting People Where They Live
Therapy has traditionally happened in one place: an office. A client walks in, sits on a couch, and for fifty minutes they talk. It's a tradition that runs deep across mental health care — and there's something I've always liked about it. There's a ritual to it, a container that says: this hour is different from the rest of your life.
But I've never actually practiced that way. I've never had a traditional office. And the longer I've worked, the more I've come to see that as a feature, not a gap.
The truth is, people aren't fully themselves in a clinical room. They're shaped by the apartment they come home to, the neighbors they wave at, the grocery store where they run into someone from their past. So much of what brings someone into therapy — isolation, disconnection, anxiety about their environment — actually lives outside the therapy room, in the everyday spaces of home and community.
That's why I believe in meeting people where they actually are.
Sometimes that means a home visit, when it's clinically appropriate and helpful — seeing the space someone lives in tells me things they might never think to mention. A cluttered kitchen, a too-quiet apartment, a wall of family photos: these are data, not decoration. Other times it means understanding a client's community — their church or synagogue, their gym, their block — as part of the support system we're building together, not just background noise.
There's also something quietly powerful about reducing the distance between therapy and life. When care only happens in a sterile office an hour away, it can start to feel like a separate, compartmentalized activity — something you do, rather than something woven into how you live. Meeting people closer to their own context helps therapy feel less like an appointment and more like part of a real, sustained relationship with their own wellbeing.
Right now, most of my work happens virtually — and I believe strongly in what telehealth makes possible: consistency, ease, meeting on a hard week without adding a commute to the list. But as I grow this practice, I want to build toward a mix — telehealth and home visits working together, not one replacing the other. A telehealth session offers flexibility; an in-person visit at home can deepen connection in a way a screen can't. Together, they'd give clients the best of both — flexibility without losing the grounded, real-world context that makes the work meaningful.
This doesn't mean throwing out structure or boundaries — those matter enormously in this work, and it's exactly what I appreciate about the traditional model even as I've built my practice differently. It means expanding where healing is allowed to happen, and staying curious about the environments that shape my clients long after our session ends.
At the end of the day, people don't heal in isolation from their lives. They heal in the middle of them — at home, in their neighborhoods, surrounded by the people and places that matter to them. My job is to show up there too, in whatever way is clinically responsible and genuinely useful.
This is the heart of where I see this practice heading — rooted in Venice Beach, and reaching clients across Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, Mar Vista, and Playa Vista — meeting people in the neighborhoods they already call home, rather than asking them to leave those neighborhoods behind for an hour each week.
With care,
Brigit Jacoby, LCSW