Confidential Therapy for Public and Private Company Directors
Therapy for board directors, for the part you cannot take back into the boardroom
CEREVITY matches board directors with licensed clinicians who understand accountability held at a distance, decisions made on material somebody else selected, and a role where the list of people you can safely call is empty. 100% virtual. Private-pay. No claim is filed and no diagnosis code is created.
The short answer
Therapy for board directors at CEREVITY is confidential private-pay psychotherapy for people serving on public and private company boards. Clinicians carry senior leaders as core caseload, sessions run seven days a week from early morning to late evening, and nothing generates an insurance claim, a diagnosis code or a carrier record. Sessions come in 50 minutes, 90 minutes and 3 hours, nationwide.
The question directors ask first
Could anything said here end up as somebody else's document?
It is the right instinct from a person whose email is retained and whose calendar may be read years later by strangers. Here is what private-pay care creates, what it does not, and the part we will not answer for you.
No claim means no payer file
Private-pay care submits no insurance claim and generates no diagnosis code, so no carrier ever opens a record of you. There is nothing in a payer database for anyone to ask about later, because nothing was put there in the first place.
The record stays with your clinician
Your clinical file is held by your licensed clinician alone, under HIPAA and legal privilege. It does not go to the company, the chair, the general counsel, the nominating committee, or any adviser to the board. Nobody is told that you started.
What a questionnaire asks belongs to the questionnaire and your counsel
Director questionnaires, committee paperwork and disclosure language differ by company and change from year to year, and we are not going to characterize any of it. We will not tell you what a form covers, what your obligations are, or how to answer one. That belongs to the document itself, read directly, with your own counsel where it matters. What we will state plainly is what CEREVITY generates: no claim, no diagnosis code, no carrier record, and a clinical file held by your clinician under HIPAA and privilege.
What a director actually brings into the room
Not the general executive version of this. Six patterns our clinicians see in people who carry accountability without holding operating control.
Deciding on material you did not gather
The pack arrives days ahead, assembled by the people whose performance you are assessing. You vote on what you were shown and then live with what nobody put in front of you.
No peer you can safely call
Fellow directors are colleagues in a body with shared exposure, not confidants. Management reports to the board. Your spouse should not have to hold it. The list of people who could actually hear the hardest item is empty.
The item you approved that went wrong
An acquisition, an appointment, a decision to wait one more quarter. Years later you still open the memo in your head, looking for the line where you should have pushed harder.
Vigilance spread across several boards
Three or four mandates, each with a quarter that can turn. Something is always live somewhere. You have lost the ability to tell alert from braced.
Standing at the edge of a crisis you cannot run
A restatement, an investigation, an abrupt departure. You are accountable for oversight and barred from operating, which is a particular helplessness that almost no advice addresses.
Relevance, and what comes after the last meeting
The tenure conversation is coming, or has quietly started. Underneath the governance argument sits a plainer question about who you are when you are no longer in the room.
What therapy for board directors actually involves
Clinical treatment rather than governance advice, delivered to someone accustomed to being briefed and not to being treated.
Intake, and a formulation put in writing
The opening sessions establish the picture: sleep, the shape of the worry, what drinking has become, and whether this is chronic stress, an anxiety disorder, depression, or grief about a role that is ending. Directors tend to arrive having already framed it as a workload problem. Your clinician takes the framing seriously, then tests it with validated instruments so there is a baseline instead of a summary.
Within a few sessions you have an explicit formulation and a plan matched to it: what the approach is, what it is expected to change, and what would count as it not working. You have spent a career asking management for exactly those three things, and you will ask here.
Work that fits around a board calendar
Sessions run seven days a week, early morning through late evening, which covers travel weeks, the days that disappear into committee, and the stretch either side of a meeting when the material is all you can think about. Moving an hour is planned for, not treated as a lapse.
Nothing about the work touches the company. There is no engagement letter with the organization, no invoice going anywhere near it, and no report on you to anyone. The relationship is between you and a licensed clinician, and it ends there.
What moves first, and what takes longer
Early: sleep, the rehearsing that starts the night before a meeting, the irritability that arrives at home instead of at the table, and the physical symptoms you have been putting down to travel. These respond first, and they make the rest of the work possible.
Later, the harder material: what it does to a person to be responsible for outcomes they cannot control, the vote that is still being relitigated privately, and the question of what remains once the last mandate ends. That one gets an honest answer more easily when it is not being asked at the end of a bad quarter.
Therapy for board directors is not board coaching or a peer forum
Much of what directors find when they search for help is coaching, or a members-only forum of other directors. Both have their place. Neither can take a clinical history, treat what it turns up, or hold privilege over a word of what you say in the room.
| CEREVITY, Licensed Therapy | Board Coaching or a Director Peer Forum | |
|---|---|---|
| Who is in the room | Clinicians who hold their own state licenses (PhD, PsyD, LCSW, LMFT) and answer personally to a board for what happens in session | No license required. A coach answers to whoever engaged them; a forum answers to its own membership |
| What it can treat | Anxiety, depression, insomnia, grief, trauma after a crisis: assessment first, then evidence-based treatment matched to the formulation | Nothing clinical. Governance craft, committee technique and network building sit outside any treatment scope |
| Confidentiality and privilege | The file belongs to the treating clinician under HIPAA, and therapist-patient privilege is recognized in legal proceedings. The protection is genuine and bounded: a narrow set of exceptions, imminent danger among them, applies | A confidentiality norm at most. No privilege attaches, and the other people in a director forum sit on boards of their own |
| What reaches a payer | Nothing whatsoever. Without a claim there is no occasion for a diagnosis code to be assigned | No claim either, though a coach the company engages is paid by the company you oversee |
| Right for | Sleeplessness before meetings, anxiety, depression, the aftermath of a crisis or an investigation, and the stretch when carrying it privately has stopped working | Craft and positioning when nothing is clinically wrong: chairing technique, committee readiness, building toward a first public board |
Concierge by design: no directory, no search
Tell us how many mandates, which committees, and what has actually been going on. A human being reads that and chooses the clinician; there is no list to work through.
Where we practice: nationwide. Our psychologists hold PsyPact authority in the participating states, and individually licensed clinicians hold the rest. Where the company is incorporated is beside the point. The state you are physically in during the session is the whole of it, so tell us how your year is actually distributed and licensing is arranged behind you. No premises by design: no reception desk, no signing in, nobody seeing you somewhere you are not expected to be.
Get MatchedWhat directors say about the room they sit in
of directors surveyed said at least one of their fellow board members should be replaced, which the firm reported as the highest level in the survey's history.
Source: PwC, 2025 Annual Corporate Directors Surveyof directors said the total hours their board obligations require had increased, and public company directors reported spending 242 hours a year on board duties on average.
Source: Spencer Stuart Director Pulse Survey, 2024of directors rated their own board's current CEO succession planning process as excellent, in a survey of more than 200 directors of publicly traded U.S. companies.
Source: Corporate Board Member, What Directors Think 2025Choose the length the quarter allows
Three lengths, chosen against what is actually in front of you. A weekly hour is where most directors settle; a longer block between meeting cycles is useful when there is a great deal to cover at once.
The weekly hour, kept with the regularity you would give a standing committee call.
90minExtendedFifty percent longer, for material a shorter hour reaches exactly as the time runs out.
3hoursIntensiveA single long block in a gap between cycles, or after a quarter that needs more than an hour at a time.
Treated by clinicians, reviewed by clinicians
Every CEREVITY clinician is independently licensed and works with directors as core caseload, not a curiosity. This page is clinically reviewed by Trevor Grossman, PhD, Licensed Psychologist.
- PhD & PsyD psychologists with PsyPact mobility authority
- LCSW / LMFT / LPCC clinicians, multi-state licensed
- Evidence-based care: CBT, ACT, psychodynamic & somatic approaches
- HIPAA-secure telehealth; records stay between you and your clinician
One director, one board year
“We approved the acquisition on a Thursday and I had a bad feeling I could not defend with anything in the materials, so I said nothing. Eighteen months later we wrote most of it off. Nobody has ever mentioned my vote and nobody ever will. The sentence that surprised me in session was that I have been careful ever since, and that careful has mostly meant quiet. That has not changed much. I did ask one question last quarter I would not have asked before.
Independent director, consumer products, 15 months with CEREVITY
Shared with permission by a former client; identifying details altered to protect confidentiality. Individual experiences vary.
You sit on the body that reviews everyone else's judgment. Nobody has ever asked after yours.
Get Matched NowQuestions board directors ask before starting therapy
Could any of this end up in company paperwork or in a proceeding?
My calendar is set a year out and half of it is travel. When would sessions happen?
The company offers an executive coach and an assistance program. Why not use those?
I keep homes in two states and I sit on boards in a third. Does that matter?
What are the fees, and is insurance any part of this?
Why does paying privately matter in a board role?
The clinical ground around governance roles
What brings a director to a first session is rarely one item. These pages cover the presentations and the adjacent roles that come up most often.
The next board cycle begins either way.
One conversation is all it takes, and it happens outside the company and outside the board. Matching is usually same-day, often inside the hour.
Seven days a week, early morning to late evening · Current session and support hours are on the contact page, shown in your time zone