Therapy During Business Litigation: How to Get Help Without Talking About the Case
If a business partner stole from you and the dispute became a lawsuit, your attorney has probably warned you to watch what you say and who you say it to.
I interviewed a business litigation attorney who represents the people who were harmed in these cases, most often in disputes between partners and family members. I asked whether he ever recommends a therapist or a support group to his clients. His answer was direct: “I would recommend that they don’t, just from an evidentiary perspective.”
His reason is privilege. Everything a client tells him is protected, which means the other side can’t demand it. In his state, conversations with a spouse are protected too, and so are conversations with a priest or a rabbi. A therapist isn’t automatically on that list. As he put it, “just because you speak with a therapist, that does not necessarily mean it’s privileged.”
For clients who see a therapist anyway, he gives one rule: “You can talk about your feelings about going to war with your sister, uncle, brother, whatever, but don’t get into the merits.” He called it “a very hard line and word of caution.”
Therapy records are always protected by HIPAA in the United States. But HIPAA was written for everyday privacy, and lawsuits can be an exception to privacy if there is a court order to release records. So, if your lawsuit claims emotional damages, your mental health can become part of the case itself. How much protection your records have depends on your state and your case.
This business litigator’s rule of talking about feelings but not merits stays in effect for as long as the case is open, and cases stay open longer than you’d expect. The attorney told me two to three years is normal in the state courts where he practices, and most partnership disputes are state cases.
Some end up in federal court instead, usually when the partners live in different states, and the timelines there are no shorter: in 2024, even the fastest federal court typically took about 13 months to get a civil case to trial, and the slowest took more than five years.
And the betrayal started even earlier than the lawsuit. In the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners 2024 study of 1,921 fraud cases, the typical scheme had been going for 12 months before anyone caught it.
Most cases, state or federal, never reach a trial at all.
Everything else ended in settlement or dismissal, and the attorney told me settlement terms are typically confidential. So the years of not talking usually don’t end with a jury saying you were right. They end with an agreement that says you can’t discuss the terms.
If you’re in active litigation now, staying silent about your case probably looks like this: You don’t tell anyone the full story, so you keep telling it to yourself, at night, in the car, in the shower where you rehearse answers to questions nobody has asked you yet. You reread your operating agreement and your old emails, looking for the moment you should have caught the theft. Friends ask how the lawsuit is going, and you say it’s going, because you’re not sure what’s safe to say.
Most people plan to wait until the case ends before getting help, because waiting seems like the only option. The numbers say the wait is years.
But there’s another option, one that doesn’t ask you to risk your case or wait years to deal with what the betrayal did to you.
I run one-day intensives for business owners after a business betrayal. The method I use, Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART), is a good fit for active litigation cases because it doesn’t require you to describe what happened. You can go through the entire session without telling me who did what, what was taken, or any other facts of your case, and ART will still work.
That means the session leaves nothing for the other side’s lawyers to ask about. That follows the attorney’s rule: you’re talking about your feelings without getting into the merits.
If you settled under confidential terms or signed an NDA, you can resolve the betrayal without discussing anything the agreement covers.
If your case is open, we’ll coordinate with your attorney before we schedule anything, and he or she can set whatever boundaries the case requires.
After the intensive, you stop spending your evenings going over what your partner did, or rereading documents that don’t have the answer to “how did this happen?” that you’re looking for. You also stop treating the betrayal as proof that you can’t judge people correctly. You didn’t miss the signs, the signs were hidden from you, and the ACFE numbers show the typical scheme stays hidden for a full year.
You can read about how the intensive works by clicking the button below, or reach out directly to me with your questions.