Leela Ehrhart
Coach + Writer
I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about what happens when the explanations we’ve been given stop being useful. These days, I’m especially interested in what comes next.
What comes next?
For a long time, much of my life and work revolved around psychiatric drugs and withdrawal. I started taking psychiatric drugs when I was young and eventually spent years slowly tapering off them. That experience changed the way I thought about a lot of things I had previously taken for granted: mental health, healing, expertise, authority, and how much any of us can really know about what is right for someone else.
It also eventually became my work. I spent years alongside people who were tapering psychiatric drugs, going through withdrawal, or trying to make sense of what had happened to them after being harmed, failed, or poorly served by the mental health system.
That experience is still part of how I see the world and part of the work I do. Over time, though, my attention started moving toward a bigger question: What happens when your life no longer needs to revolve around healing, recovering, or making sense of what happened?
I became interested in what happens when something that has organized so much of your life starts to take up less space. When an identity that once made sense begins to feel too small. When a framework that helped you understand yourself starts feeling more constraining than useful. Or when you simply realize that the way you have been living is no longer the way you want to keep living.
There may not be a clear answer waiting on the other side of that realization.
That is part of what interests me.
What do you actually want? What have you outgrown? What are you still doing because you choose it, and what are you doing because somewhere along the way it simply became the way things were? What might you try if you did not need to know ahead of time exactly where it would lead?
I have become increasingly skeptical of universal formulas for how people are supposed to heal, change, succeed, or live. I am more interested in what happens when we begin doing things differently, pay attention to what we learn, and let that experience inform what we do next. Sometimes the only way to find out what is possible is to participate in creating something different.
That is much of what I am exploring now, in my writing and in my work with people: how we question the answers we inherited, recognize when something has run its course, begin making different choices, and see what becomes possible from there.
Coaching
I work one-to-one with people who know they want to do something differently, even if they are not yet sure what that looks like.
Sometimes something significant has changed. Sometimes nothing dramatic has happened, but you know that a way of doing things has run its course. You may be facing a decision, circling something you have not acted on, or realizing that you do not want to keep living the way you have been living.
We can look closely at what is actually happening, question assumptions you may have stopped noticing, and get clearer about what you want. Then we can ask what you might actually do differently and see what that teaches you.
There is room for reflection, uncertainty, and not knowing. The work also has to meet your actual life. That might mean making a decision, trying something, having a conversation, changing what you do, or seeing what happens when you stop waiting to feel completely certain.
We can begin before you know exactly where you are going. What matters is being willing to try something, pay attention to what happens, and take it from there.
Individual sessions are 60–75 minutes and cost $250. Packages are offered on a limited basis and start at $600. I sometimes customize longer-term arrangements when it makes sense.
A free course on meaning + purpose
This is a free six-week course for people who feel disconnected from a sense of meaning or purpose after something in their life has shifted, come apart, or stopped fitting.
Each week, I’ll send you a short video introducing an idea, along with something to try or consider in your own life. We’ll look at what can happen when you stop waiting to have everything figured out and begin engaging with these questions differently.
The course isn’t six weeks to find your purpose. It’s a place to begin: to work with some new ideas, try some different ways of participating in your life, and see what you learn from there.
Writing
I publish essays at This, For Now. about the things I think are worth looking at more closely.
That might begin with something in my own life, an idea we’ve come to accept, a system I want to understand, or a question I can’t quite leave alone. I’m interested in getting underneath the easy explanations, questioning what we think we know, and seeing what else might be there.
The writing is for anyone who wants to look more closely at their own life and the world around them, and see what they find.
About
Much of my work has been shaped by years spent in and around psychiatric drug withdrawal, mental health, and questions about healing and recovery. I came to that work partly through my own experience of long-term psychiatric drug use, tapering, withdrawal, and the years of figuring out what came after.
I have a BS in Psychology and an MA in Professional Counseling, though the work I do now is not therapy or medical care. I have worked one-to-one with people as a coach and consultant, built communities, written publicly, and created resources.
That work still informs what I do. It also led me into a broader set of questions: What happens when an explanation that once made sense no longer does? What do we do when a way of understanding ourselves has run its course? What do we do when we no longer want to keep living the life we have built in the same way, or when we simply can’t?
Those are the questions I am most interested in now. I write about them, explore them in my work with people, and keep following where they lead.