Online therapy for men in Palo Alto is available through Life Telling Therapy, a California-licensed private practice offering virtual depth therapy for high-achieving men throughout Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, and the Peninsula. Jon Holmes, LMFT, specializes in narrative therapy, founder identity, executive burnout, trauma integration, and men's wound work. Free 15-minute consultations are currently available.
Silicon Valley builds men who optimize everything except their interior life.
Palo Alto and Silicon Valley have produced a distinctive kind of high-achieving man: technically sophisticated, intellectually rigorous, capable of building systems of extraordinary complexity. He has applied the same discipline to his career, his health, his finances, and his productivity. And somewhere in his 40s or 50s, he arrives at a threshold where the optimization framework stops working. The metrics are good. Something is still wrong.
The tech founder who built and exited a company and does not know who he is without the mission. The engineering leader who has been promoted past the work he loves into the management of people he cannot read. The venture-backed CEO who has learned to perform certainty for his board and his team and has lost access to his own uncertainty. These are the men I work with.
The founder identity wound.
For many men in Silicon Valley, identity and company are fused. The startup is not just a business. It is the answer to the question of who they are. When the company succeeds, the identity is validated. When it fails, or when it succeeds and is sold, the identity collapses with it. The post-exit founder is one of the most disoriented men I encounter in this work: he has achieved exactly what he set out to achieve, and he has no idea what comes next or who he is now that the mission is complete.
100% Virtual. Available to Any California Resident.
All sessions are conducted via a secure, HIPAA-compliant video platform. You join from your home office, your car, or anywhere private. There is no commute on 101, no waiting room, and no gap in your calendar that colleagues can see. Sessions are 50 minutes and scheduled around the demands of a demanding life.
Who I work with on the Peninsula.
Tech founders and operators navigating the post-exit identity question or the weight of building at scale. Engineering and product leaders who have been promoted into roles that require emotional fluency they were never trained for. Venture capitalists and investors carrying the weight of other people's futures. Physicians and biotech executives in the South Bay managing the intersection of high technical responsibility and high personal cost. Men in midlife who have built remarkable careers and are quietly asking what the second half is for.
Life Telling Processing
Life Telling Processing (LTP) is a contemplative-archetypal approach to men's therapy developed over twenty years of clinical practice. Rather than managing symptoms, LTP follows the story underneath the struggle. The tech founder does not need another framework. He needs someone to sit with him in the question he has not been able to answer with a framework. LTP is that kind of work: unhurried, serious, and oriented toward the story rather than the solution.
Does Jon Holmes work with Palo Alto and Silicon Valley clients?
Yes. Virtual therapy is available to any man who currently resides in California, including throughout the Peninsula and Silicon Valley: Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Los Altos, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose, and throughout Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
Jon Holmes, LMFT. California License MFC 45850. Virtual: throughout California. In-person: 7996 Old Winding Way, Suite 210, Fair Oaks, CA 95628. Phone: 916-534-8244.