You’ve probably noticed how an ordinary conversation can acquire a surprising number of participants when you mention that you don’t have children. Some want your reasons, others predict your future, and someone who met you eleven minutes ago has already established that you would make a wonderful parent. Mention that you’re also an atheist, with zero interest in astrology or messages from the universe, and you’ll find yourself defending a second ordinary aspect of your life. You’ll end up spending the evening explaining yourself, all because of something you mentioned in passing between ordering dinner and asking for the wine. But over dinner, you can roll your eyes and eventually change the subject. In a consulting room, the same bullshit can become your treatment plan.
You might reasonably expect never to have that conversation with a psychotherapist at all. But people before you have been advised to trust the universe or Jesus. Worse, your decision to remain childfree may get that solemn nod, complete with a tilted head and widened eyes, and get promoted to your most urgent symptom. Now you’re defending the parts of your life you were perfectly happy with, while the problem you came to discuss is put on hold.
Being childfree and nonbelieving is a particularly inconvenient combination for anyone convinced that a proper life requires children and a higher power. Parenthood and religion supply comforting answers to questions about life and death. When neither applies to you, people can become remarkably concerned about where you’re supposed to find meaning, how you’ll be dying, and how you’ll live. The problem becomes especially unsettling when someone else’s inability to imagine your life becomes a professional opinion about your mental health. Being childfree and atheist can come with a peculiar requirement to remain relentlessly delighted or these choices become the universal suspects for every one of your difficulties. I’ve chosen to specialize in psychoanalysis for childfree freethinkers because you should be able to get help with what troubles you without being gaslit toward parenthood or a spiritual awakening.
When childfreedom explains everything
The underlying problem is the assumption that parenthood is the standard against which an adult life should be judged. Psychoanalysis has some history to answer for here. Some of our traditions treated motherhood as the destination of healthy female development, which meant that a woman who didn’t want children presented an awkward problem for the theory. Conveniently, the theory could be preserved by deciding that the problem was with her. Once you accept that explanation, any difficulty she brings can become further evidence of what she is missing, while the possibility that her childfreedom has nothing to do with it unnoticeably disappears.
In a 2006 study, Debra Mollen documented experiences of women having their normality questioned, including by therapists. Her recommendations included accepting childfree women as normal; apparently, that needed putting in print. You can see why it matters when wanting children is allowed to stand as a preference while not wanting them requires supporting documentation. An unhappy childhood becomes an explanation, and a reasonably happy one can be searched until a sufficiently unfortunate memory turns up. Your past influences your preferences, just as it influences a parent’s. Having a history doesn’t turn a preference into a disease.
The same assumption distorts how the rest of your life is understood. Being childfree can matter to a difficulty without being the difficulty itself: it may affect the expectations placed on you or the relationships through which you receive support. If a friendship changes after your friend has children, for example, you may miss the ease of being available to each other. Having a baby yourself would be a remarkably elaborate solution to wanting dinner with someone you love. The useful question concerns the loss you are describing and what it means in your circumstances, rather than whether parenthood would bring you back into line.
That distinction applies just as much when childfreedom has no apparent bearing on what brings you to therapy. A period of depression doesn’t prove that you need children, any more than a parent’s depression proves they should never have had them. You can have made choices that suit you and still be struggling. Nor do you owe anyone an extraordinary life as compensation: there is no requirement to leave a masterpiece where a family tree might otherwise have been, or to become impressive enough that the relatives finally shut up. Your difficulties deserve attention, and the pleasures of your life deserve to count without first proving that you were right not to become a parent.
The assumption that you need spirituality
Secular clients have their own reasons to wonder what assumptions they’ll encounter. A 2025 U.S. study of 120 nonreligious therapy clients found that 45 percent reported at least one instance of what the researchers classified as a microaggression against nonreligious people, including assumptions that they held religious beliefs. I personally share this experience. It weakens the therapeutic relationship at least. It is difficult to speak candidly when you’re busy calculating what your therapist might make of your nonbelief, or whether mentioning it will send the conversation somewhere you’d rather not go. Wanting to know where your therapist stands is a reasonable response to that uncertainty.
I’m an atheist, and I have no wish to smuggle the supernatural back into the room under a more fashionable name. Replacing god with the universe doesn’t make a supernatural explanation any more convincing. If someone tells you that your suffering was sent to teach you a lesson, you are entitled to wonder who approved the curriculum, and whether you can withdraw. You can want explanations grounded in biological laws of life without having your skepticism interpreted as a failure to be open. An approach can take your feelings seriously while remaining entirely uninterested in what the cosmos or e deity might be trying to tell you.
When someone dies, the same need for wishful thinking becomes even less amusing. You may find the finality unbearable while remaining quite certain that an afterlife is a fantasy. Telling you that you’ll meet again asks you to accept a claim you don’t believe in order to receive the comfort being offered. You are entitled to someone who can acknowledge the loss on the terms in which you experience it, including the unfinished conversation for which you don’t expect another chance. Having to explain that position becomes an absolutely excessive burden at a time when life already requires considerable effort.
The point of specializing
My reason for specializing is to make this understanding part of the starting point. It lets me approach your difficulties in the context of the life you’re actually living, with some familiarity with the pressures you may face and no expectation that becoming a parent or acquiring a faith would put things right. Those difficulties may be closely connected to your childfreedom and nonbelief, or have nothing to do with them. Either way, you should be able to seek help without having to demonstrate that your entire life is justified before we can take its particular problems seriously.
In regular online psychoanalytic sessions, we work on the concerns that bring you and the patterns that keep them going. We pay attention to what you say and what becomes difficult to say, including reactions you may not yet understand, and consider how your experiences have shaped the way you respond now. Questions and interpretations help us examine what keeps happening, with the aim of making changes possible. Your childfreedom and nonbelief provide some of the context; the work concerns the difficulties you want help with and the life you want to lead.
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