Therapy for healthcare workers, from a clinician who stayed in the building.

You held the line. Nobody came back to check on you. For nurses, physicians, EMS, techs, and hospital staff who carried the weight of COVID, who work in systems that will not staff or protect the work, who know exactly what secondary trauma looks like and still have not booked the first session — this practice exists for you. Matthew Sexton, LCSW provides confidential, license-safe telehealth therapy for healthcare workers in New York, Maine, Delaware, and Florida.

Matthew Sexton, LCSW, NATC is a licensed clinical social worker in New York, Maine, and Delaware, registered with Florida as an out-of-state telehealth provider, and a credentialed Narcissistic Abuse Treatment Clinician. He has spent fourteen years in clinical practice and healthcare systems, and writes for the people who hold everyone else together.

In crisis right now? Call or text 988 — this page can wait.

• This isn't just burnout

  Healthcare workers often carry burnout, secondary trauma, and moral injury all at once, and treating them as one condition misses most of it. Burnout is depletion. Moral injury is the wound from being forced to act against your own values — short-staffed shifts, discharging patients before they're ready, watching preventable harm happen with no authority to stop it. Secondary traumatic stress is what builds from bearing witness to other people's worst days, call after call, shift after shift. Treatment starts by figuring out which layer is actually driving things, instead of running one generic protocol at all three.

• Moral injury gets its own treatment, not a burnout worksheet

  Moral injury isn't exhaustion and it isn't PTSD — it's a rupture between what you believe is right and what the system required of you. Treatment focuses on making sense of that rupture: separating what was actually in your control from what wasn't, and rebuilding a coherent sense of yourself as a clinician without requiring you to leave the field to do it.

• Your license and your job are not at risk for getting help

  The fear of licensure or employer consequences is the single biggest reason healthcare workers avoid treatment — and for the vast majority of presentations, that fear is not based in fact. I am not employed by your hospital, not contracted with it, and not on its peer-support or wellness committee. If you pay privately, out-of-network, no claim is filed at all and nothing routes through your health plan or any EAP. I am also in-network through Alma, and Alma's panel does include some EAP products — so if keeping this entirely outside anything your workplace touches is the point, say so on the call and we use the private-pay route. What is and isn't reportable to your specific state board gets discussed plainly in the first consult, before you decide anything.

• Post-pandemic trauma doesn't expire

  What front-line ICU and ED workers went through from 2020 through 2022 — the scarcity, the triage decisions, the deaths without family at the bedside — didn't fully process at the time, and time alone hasn't processed it since. Trauma-focused work like EMDR and IFS, paired with body-based regulation, treats what actually happened instead of asking you to just manage the aftermath better.

• Built around your actual schedule

  Sessions are telehealth, with evening and weekend availability built around 12-hour rotations, night shifts, and call coverage — not a fixed weekday slot that assumes a normal week. If your rotation changes, your session time moves with it.

• Cost and availability

  Out-of-network is $225 per session, with a superbill each month for potential reimbursement. In-network through Alma is available for the plans Alma contracts with, where you pay your normal copay instead. I'm currently accepting new clients — there's a free call to talk through whether this is the right fit.