Los Alamos is unlike any other city in New Mexico — and unlike most cities in the country. Built on a mesa in the Jemez Mountains and designed from the start as a place of concentrated intellectual purpose, it remains, decades after the Manhattan Project, one of the most cognitively intense communities in the United States. Physicists, computational scientists, engineers, national security analysts: this is the texture of ordinary life on the Hill. Thinking deeply, precisely, and under extraordinary constraint is not an exception here. It is the baseline.
What this creates — and what often brings Los Alamos residents to therapy — is a particular kind of imbalance. Jung called it the dominance of the thinking function. When the analytical, rational, system-building parts of the psyche receive all the investment, the other dimensions of inner life — the emotional, the imaginative, the relational, the symbolic — tend to accumulate quietly in the shadow. They do not disappear. They surface in dreams. In a marriage that is technically functional but somehow hollow. In a feeling, somewhere in the late forties or early fifties, that the accomplishments that were supposed to feel like enough do not.
The Psychological Weight of LANL
Working at Los Alamos National Laboratory carries a weight that is genuinely unlike most employment. The mission involves technologies and decisions at the outer edge of human consequence. Careers unfold inside classification structures that require a specific kind of compartmentalization — an enforced silence about work that is not available in ordinary professional life. You cannot bring what you actually spent your day doing into dinner conversation. You cannot fully explain your career to people outside the clearance system. Over years, this creates a particular kind of interior pressure: an inability to be fully known, even by people who love you.
The existential dimension is equally real. Working at the institution that built the first nuclear weapons, that continues to develop and maintain the nation’s nuclear arsenal, that sits at the intersection of science and unprecedented destructive capability — this is not psychologically neutral. Many LANL employees carry genuine ethical complexity about their work. Some find that complexity energizing; it confirms the importance of what they do. Others find it unsettling in ways they have not fully examined. A few find, eventually, that the examination can no longer be deferred.
Jungian therapy is particularly suited to this kind of material. It does not offer easy answers. It offers a serious framework for engaging with the questions that cannot be resolved by logic alone — questions about meaning, about moral complexity, about the gap between the person you appear to be and the person you are in the parts of yourself that only you can see.
The Thinking Type and the Underdeveloped Soul
Jung described a typology of psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Most people have a dominant function and a less developed inferior function. For highly analytical people — scientists, engineers, mathematicians — thinking is typically dominant, and feeling tends to be the least developed. This is not a pathology. It is a cognitive style with genuine strengths. But it also means that the emotional and relational dimensions of life tend to get less attention, less development, less conscious cultivation.
The inferior function does not disappear. In Jung’s framework, it goes underground, appearing in irrational emotional reactions, in dreams, in the specific vulnerabilities of midlife. The person who is brilliant at abstract reasoning may be strangely helpless in emotional conflict. The one who can hold ten variables in mind simultaneously may find themselves at a loss when a marriage requires emotional presence rather than problem-solving.
Depth therapy is one of the few approaches designed to work with exactly this structure. It does not ask you to become a different kind of person. It asks you to develop the parts of yourself that your professional training has had no use for. That development tends to be uncomfortable at first — these are precisely the parts that have been left alone because they were inconvenient — and genuinely enlarging over time. People who have spent decades inside a highly rational world often find depth work one of the most interesting intellectual encounters of their lives, precisely because the unconscious operates by rules that their training never equipped them to read.
Online Therapy and the Visibility Problem
Los Alamos is a small town. That is one of its genuine appeals — the sense of community, the proximity of neighbors who are also doing serious work, the quality of life that comes with space and mountain access. It is also a circumstance that creates a specific kind of barrier to seeking therapy. In a community of a few thousand people, being seen walking into a therapist’s office is not an abstract concern. Colleagues notice. Social worlds overlap. The decision to seek help can feel like a decision to have that decision known.
Online therapy removes this barrier entirely. Sessions happen from wherever you choose: your home office, your studio, the room where you have your morning coffee. There is no commute down the Hill, no parking, no waiting room where you might encounter someone from work. The container is private and secure, and it exists inside the ordinary geography of your own life.
For people holding security clearances, the confidentiality of therapy is an additional consideration. Licensed therapists are bound by strict confidentiality protections. Therapy is not a reportable activity and does not affect clearance status. The content of sessions is not accessible to employers or government agencies through any lawful channel. You can be fully honest inside the therapeutic relationship in ways that the clearance environment may make impossible elsewhere.
What Depth Therapy Looks Like in Practice
Sessions are 50 minutes, held via secure video connection. You bring whatever is most alive: a dream you had this week, a pattern in your relationships that keeps repeating, an emotional reaction that surprised you with its intensity, a growing sense that the life you have built is somehow too small for who you are becoming.
The work is not directive. Jill Ansell does not follow a protocol or move clients through predetermined stages. The sessions follow the actual material of your inner life, building on each other over time as a genuine picture of your psychological landscape emerges. Early sessions are often exploratory — a careful, curious examination of what is actually present. Later sessions can access much deeper material because of the foundation that has been laid.
Many Los Alamos clients find that paying attention to their dreams — beginning to note them, bring them to sessions, take them seriously as a source of information — becomes one of the most unexpected gifts of this work. The unconscious speaks every night. For people who have spent their careers learning to listen carefully to what data is actually saying, the discipline of dream attention is often more accessible than they expected. The images are harder to interpret than a dataset. But they are equally real, and they carry information that no waking analysis can fully substitute for.
A Free Discovery Call
If you have been considering therapy but have not acted on it — whether because of time, because of the visibility concern, because the options available locally have not felt quite right — a free 15-minute discovery call with Jill Ansell is a low-threshold way to begin. There is no commitment, no assessment, no intake paperwork. It is simply a conversation about where you are and whether this kind of work might serve you.
Los Alamos residents who are ready to attend to the parts of their inner life that professional achievement cannot reach will find a thoughtful, experienced, and genuinely curious companion in this work. Reach out to schedule a conversation.