Guiding Clients Through Anxiety Amid Presidential Policy Shifts: A Mental Health Professional's Approach

How to support clients' mental well-being during POTUS policy changes

Apr 22, 2025

Over the past few months, I’ve written a series of articles for those in the mental health field on how to support others during times of political change. These pieces are not political commentary, but rather offer practical tools and resources for navigating policy shifts that impact mental health providers, businesses, and clients. The first article explores how organizations can respond to policy changes affecting both clients and staff. The second focuses on how professionals can care for themselves and others in the field. If you have not seen my previous articles you can check them out here: What Mental Health Businesses Can Be Doing Following POTUS Executive Orders and POTUS Transitions and Mental Health Professionals: What We Can Do.

My intention with this series is to offer validation and a sense of direction for fellow mental health professionals navigating uncertainty. This is not meant to serve as supervision, nor is it a directive on how others should practice. Rather, it is a reflection of my own clinical thinking in hopes that it resonates with, supports, or sparks thoughtful consideration among those who may also be questioning or struggling during this time.

As policy changes increase, so do questions about how to support our clients through them. In this article, I explore some suggestions on how mental health professionals can navigate political changes and offers practical tools and techniques for client care. These are recommendations that have been gathered through my own work, conversations from other professionals, and research.

Validation:

Validate, validate, validate: With these policies attacking people’s rights, some people are worried and others dismissive. Clients surrounded by dismissive people may begin to self-gaslight. “Is it really that bad?” or “Am I just overacting.” Everything people are feeling right now, whether it be frightened or victimized, it is all valid. Clients can work to build skills to self-validate their own experiences to mitigate any self-gaslighting. For some helpers, validation may be the only thing you can provide which is okay. Sometimes great change can come from validation.

Find the balance: Assist clients in finding middle ground between getting stuck in the worry of policy changes and taking meaningful action. Does a certain level of anxiousness, although understandable, interfere with working towards their goals? Is the intensity of their worry leading to avoidance or inaction? This is a delicate balance between validating the all consuming overwhelm and motivating clients to take action that supports sustainability.

Beyond CBT: We can't CBT our way out of political instability or a constitutional crisis. We can’t reframe planes crashing every month or attacks on personal rights. These attacks are systemic, not cognitive. We can help clients find ways to cope, build resilience, and recognize we need collective action, not just internal reframing.

Mindfulness:

Healthy distractions: Just as there needs to be a balance between shutdown and motivation, there also needs to be a balance in how clients use healthy distractions. When anxiety becomes overwhelming, it’s important that the distractions they turn to provide relief and don’t become all consuming that they lead to avoidance or disconnection. Another difficult and understandable balancing act that if not carefully managed can delay progress towards goals.

Calming strategies: Identify the client’s self-care strategies and how they can implement them into their routine. Providing clients calming techniques can make weathering the storms a little easier. Implement with clients grounding techniques, breathing exercises, and progressive muscle relaxation that may assist them from emotional intensity. If these strategies are already familiar to them, gentle reminders and reinforcement may support consistent use and prevent dysregulation during challenging moments.

Monitor Information:

Be mindful with information: There is going to be a lot of policy changes that impact clients directly and may impact your services with them. If clients are looking for this information, it might be best to be mindful with how you inform them and their own readiness for that information. Is the client regulated to take in this knowledge at the time? How can you best deliver information that is sensitive to the client’s needs? How can you assist the client in regulating themselves after distressing news?

Monitor social media use: Implementing mindfulness and monitoring techniques with political content could decrease client dysregulation. Pairing this with assisting clients in identifying somatic sensations can help them better monitor when social media breaks are needed.

Cope Ahead:

Coping ahead skills: The cope ahead skill comes from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) which can be an extremely useful tool during this time. It is intended for you to think about ways you can plan ahead and be prepared for stress inducing events or situations. Identify with clients ways they can cope ahead with policy changes. Here is a good break down of this skill:

Take inventory of supplies: Clients may be feeling anxious with possible resources becoming limited and prices increasing. It might helpful for clients to identify things they have and don’t have. Assist clients in taking inventory of what they have for personal resources and skillsets. The purpose is to make clients feel more grounded. For personal resources, this can include: safe family members and friendships, community, supplies, and local resources. Additionally, you can assist the client in identify their own skillsets. This can include: gardening, cooking, sewing, connecting with others, or other trade skills. Identifying various skills are not necessarily for clients to monetize them, but to be assets for building community. This could be considered as one type of safety plan to cope ahead and act as if their anxieties would come true.

Build community: As noted above, help clients identify family, friends, community, and spaces where the client feels safe, heard, and validated. If these are things not currently present, assist the client in finding that community. Sometimes case managers and skills workers know of events and or community engagement programs the client can attend. Explore with the client other ways they can build community or online. This could include local workshops or mutual aid groups. Since building community can be hard and take time, identifying the clients needs in community and what safety looks like can be a good starting point.

What are other ways you can cope ahead with your clients?

Discernment:

Discernment skills: Another mindfulness skill involves the power of discernment which involves several other tangible skills. Discernment involves assessing new people and managing the self with existing people. This means taking a step back with others and observing how they manage their emotions, take feedback, and respect you and your time. While taking inventory, you are not justifying any unhealthy or unacceptable behavior. Discernment can be equally applied to the POTUS’s behavior and policy changes.

OODA loop: One discernment skill is the OODA Loop framework, observation (O), orientation (O), decision (D), and action (A) which was designed to assist in making effective decisions. The first step is to identify and observe the issue. This is where you take in the data—internal and external. It could be body sensations, emotions, client behavior, environmental cues, stressors or new information that just showed up. Observation is about gathering the raw material of experience without judgment or immediate reaction. Orientation involves interpreting the information through their lens. This means their experiences, values, training, and even biases. Orientation helps you understand the context and connect the dots. Decide-now that you’ve taken in the data and made sense of it, you’re ready to choose your next step. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be informed by what you know right now. Action is putting the decision into motion. Action helps you test your interpretation. The beauty of the OODA Loop is that it’s circular, you’re never stuck. You’re allowed (and encouraged) to loop back and adjust as needed. Here is a visual example:

The OODA Loop - The Decision Lab — Source: OODA Loop

The OODA Loop can be a great skills for clients when working on their acting “as if” skills or when they are contemplating their next steps in the mist of increasingly worrying times. This could be paired with the stages of change and identify which stage they are in: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, or maintenance. This skill and techniques mentioned in this article remind me of acceptance and commitment therapy and other DBT skills such as Observe, Describe, Participate, STOP, and radical acceptance. Other skills that may also be useful.

Locus of control: Right now, things feel so overwhelming it might seem like a lot of things are outside of our control. It might be useful to break down exactly what is in our control and what is not in our control. For example, the economy, inflation, and volatility are outside of our control, but finances and activism are all in our control. While it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by what’s happening on a national level, it’s just as important to focus on what’s within our control. Here is a great visual example of a list that can be made:

Final note: Some of these policies that are being presented are not being passed. When there are a lot of policies quickly being pushed out that attack people’s rights, it makes us feel worried, weakened, and overwhelmed. When we feel shut down, we cannot take action or push back. It makes it much harder to take care of ourselves and others. I think a good reminder in all of this is that if you are feeling shut down, it means that they are accomplishing what they want in all of this. They want you to be anxious and scared so that you become complacent. It is valid to feel that and now it is time to act. We can’t control the systems we work within, but we can stay grounded, curious, and connected to our values. Sometimes that’s the most therapeutic thing we can do not just for our clients, but for ourselves.