Matt Sosnowsky, LCSW, LICSW, MSW, MAPP is the founder of Philadelphia Talk Therapy.

For over a decade, Mr. Sosnowsky has served in agencies and private practice helping individuals overcome mental health challenges, manage life transitions, and find passion, meaning—and ultimately happiness in life.

He served as Director of Clinical Intelligence at Twill Health (formerly, Happify©) from 2019 to 2023, leveraging AI to support digital mental health solutions. He began his career working with undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania Counseling and Psychiatric Services (CAPS).

Mr. Sosnowsky earned his Masters in clinical Social Work (MSW) from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. 



He was also one of the first graduates of Penn’s Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program, the country’s first curriculum specializing in positive psychology—the scientific study of well-being. 

He earned a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Finance from Penn State University in 2002.

Steve Martorano 

The Behavioral Corner is produced in partnership with Retreat Behavioral Health -- where healing happens.



The Behavioral Corner 
Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano, and this is the Behavioral Corner. You're invited to hang with us as we discuss how we live today, the choices we make, what we do, and how they affect our health and well-being. So you're on the corner, the Behavioral Corner. Please hang around for a while.

Steve Martorano 
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Behavioral Corner. It's me, Steve Martorano, and what we do here on this podcast is talk about everything. I love the idea that we're a podcast about everything, even though that doesn't sound very humble podcast about everything because everything ultimately affects our behavioral health. And we're lucky we run into a bunch of interesting people. And we hope you're becoming informed about a lot of these issues, whether it be substance abuse disorder and its treatment or, in general, your wellness and your mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. So if you're just finding us, you know, wherever podcasts are live from Behavioral Corner, it is made possible by our underwriting partners retreat, behavioral health. You'll hear more about them a little bit down the road. So let me tell you even briefly, real quickly, before I introduce our guest, we're going to talk about uncertainty with us as a normal course of things. You'd have to be very foolish to think that you're absolutely able to predict everything that's going to occur on any given day, much less the rest of your life. So certainty is with us, surely as the air we breathe. There is a sense, though, among some of the people I've been reading and talking to, that we may be in the myths of uncertainty on steroids are the phrase that caught my attention, which is what we'll talk about today, radical uncertainty. And again, just before I introduce Matt, let me share with you the most recent example of what I'm talking about in an essay from the New York Times. Just yesterday, and I quote from The Times for a good reason, humanity now faces a confluence of challenges unlike any other in its history, climate change rapidly or altering the conditions of life on our planet. Tensions over Ukraine and Taiwan have revived the specter of a conflict between nuclear powers and the Breakneck development of artificial intelligence by raising serious concerns about the risk of AI-induced global catastrophe, among other things, this troubling situation calls for new perspectives to make sense of a rapidly changing world and work out where we are headed. I summed that up to mean radical uncertainty, and we've brought somebody in who's impacted by that in his practice. Matt Sosnowsky is the founder and director of Philadelphia Talk Therapy, a counseling practice that serves the Philadelphia area in person and the Washington DC area remotely. He will give us a bit more background on his expertise. He's a psychotherapist, and we welcome him to the behavioral corner. Matt, let me apologize for that long-winded introduction.

Matt Sosnowsky  
No, no worries, Steve. At least you picked a manageable task for us to handle; we should be able to wrap this up pretty quickly. Thanks for having me on the show.

Steve Martorano 
Thank you for your time. I appreciate it a lot. You know, I was looking around for someone to talk about this because, as I said, when I first saw the phrase radical uncertainty, it was in an economic context. I know nothing about economics, but I know what economic models are supposed to do. Economic models are supposed to be able to predict the future economically so that we can adjust our economy accordingly. And the phrase that struck me was. It's not working so well. That's why these economic models keep failing. And people going, Well, how did that happen? The models were often people behaving like people. And we had, you know, we have huge messes that we have to clean up. And he used the phrase radical uncertainty. And I thought immediately, Well, if economics is experiencing radical uncertainty, so are the rest of us. And what does that mean for behavioral health? So as a therapist and a clinician, tell us how that's impacting what you do.

Matt Sosnowsky 
Yeah, there are a lot of crossovers between what you quoted, Steve, and what I see. So I see largely young and emerging adults, so college-age individuals 20s 30s. And as I get into my 40s, I'm seeing more and more forty-year-olds only seems fitting. And yeah, I hear a lot of the same things. But not just those things. So political global political discord, including the war in Ukraine, most no believe but domestic in general, the rise of authoritarianism around the globe, climate for certain, and what used to be, I think, anxiety about our future. And our existence is now very much a daily occurrence, wildfires, floods. You name it. And one thing that wasn't mentioned in there that I think young people experience, and in particular, I'm thinking 20-year-olds, and 30-year-olds, is financial uncertainty. So things like debt and student loans, what feels like incomprehensible wealth inequality, that, again, used to be maybe more of a global phenomenon that was very much domestic, creates a lot of anxiety. And I think concerns about the social safety net, or lack thereof, is what I hear young people describe, and it feels overwhelming. A lot of times, I'll hear the phrase, you know, the world is on fire. And, you know, you hear that from one client and you know, sticks in your head, when you hear it from half dozen clients, in a handful of weeks, he starts to realize that we're dealing with something that might be a little bit of an epidemic,

Steve Martorano 
right? So in your experience, we're not making too much of this notion that we've come on almost untethered. In a sense, as a society, no one starts their day, I don't believe in charting a course because of the war in Ukraine or climate change. And yet, is it true that there's a kind of cumulative effect of those situations that is producing negative mental health outcomes?

Matt Sosnowsky 
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't think this period is unique to modern human history, per se. And it's not exactly my area of expertise. But I think the notion of chaos all around us. We can see data throughout the last century. But for sure, in our lifetimes, I think this is an acutely challenging environment. And I agree, I don't think it's acutely challenging on a macro level, but I don't think we necessarily see it in a single instance, so much as it's sort of in the air we breathe.

Steve Martorano 
And in a sense, that makes the problem, I think, more acute because if it were one thing or two things that seemed monumentally disturbing, and it was affecting our behavioral health, well, we could focus on that and hope. Maybe some of our actions could be alleviated, but when it seems to be everything, then I think we become, I guess, paralyzed. I mean, even the good stuff, look, AI, we're gonna talk about artificial intelligence a little bit later. But even in that sense, where on the one side of the ledger, they say, this technology is going to change the world in ways we can't imagine for the better. The other side is also saying unless it destroys everything. So as you know, as a person who has anxiety problems, to begin with, I mean, how do you? How do you deal with something like that when it could be either or? Okay, we've set the stage I happen to think this is a particularly unique moment. It has had, has happened at other times in history, certainly, Gutenberg Press changed the way the world was before the press and after, and certainly, other technological events have occurred. But I think this is a particularly important moment. So I think it's big and changing. How does a clinician like you have a professional IQ? Who sees people who are anxious, who are depressed, and maybe self-medicating with drugs? How do you begin putting that back together? Begin with some symptoms. For instance, what are some of the things you see?

Matt Sosnowsky  
Yes, sure. So I think that's, that's exactly the right place to start. So, I think, for anyone listening to this podcast living in the world, and trying to get ahead of this to any extent, being aware of the effects it's having on you at that, you know, we talked about this like kind of slow boil. I think that metaphor is right that, you know, the frog in the pot doesn't not realizing it's being boiled. So I think being aware of the basic symptoms of major depression or even just Environmental depression, low mood feeling down is really important. So that can be in a range from low mood itself, irritability, lack of energy, social withdrawal, change in appetite, change in sleep patterns, and even suicidal thoughts. You know, the misconception I think about suicidal thoughts is that they're always sort of, they have what's called a high lethality, right that somebody intends to kill themselves. But passive, suicidal thoughts are much more common in the clients I see, which is just this sense of things would be easier if, if I didn't wake up in the morning, or what would it be like to not have to manage these stressors. And that's a safety issue, but it's also diagnostic. So even if you're not a risk to yourself, you might notice I'm having these thoughts, and that is a symptom of depression or dysphoria. So I think from the clinical side of things, just being aware of the gradual accumulation of those types of symptoms is really important.

Steve Martorano 
You used in some of the notes you sent me. You use a phrase that I'd like you to expand upon called psychological flexibility. What do you mean by that?

Matt Sosnowsky 
Yeah, so that kind of gets into a way of thinking about how to adapt our approach to some of these stressors. So to go back to what to look for, there's a concept called the cognitive triad. It's basically, like, a super simple back-of-the-envelope way to, perhaps, understand if you might be experiencing depression, and it's the way that we perceive ourselves, the world, and the future. And when we have negative views that are also fixed, I'm a bad person. The world is broken. And there is no hope for the future. That's an indication that we might be depressed and have psychological flexibility. You hear in the mainstream. You hear that resilience over the last couple of decades is really prevalent, not just in psychology but then in different applications of psychology, such as in education and even the military. The pen resiliency program is about teaching psychological flexibility, teaching, resilience, and soldiers. And that idea is fairly simple but hard to execute, which is the ability to hold two truths at the same time to hold ambiguity.

Steve Martorano 
For instance, in the military sense, are you saying that soldiers see horrors? But the practice of flexibility, psychological flexibility, keeps them on point. They can still do their job by keeping both thoughts in their head. This is a bad situation, I could get killed. But I have a job to do. Is that what that means in the simple form?

Matt Sosnowsky 
Yeah. And I'll preface by saying I'm not it because it's such an extreme population of soldiers in combat. Yeah. I'm not an expert. And I haven't trained soldiers, but I was recently reading about trauma boning up on literature about trauma. And another thing that's misunderstood is two people can experience the same traumatic event, and one person can build PTSD, and another person can process that experience themselves.

Steve Martorano 
Do we let me stop you right there? Because it's a great point. Do we know why that is? What the one person possesses that the other doesn't? Is this flexibility you're talking about? Yeah,

Matt Sosnowsky 
I think it's it's a combination of things. But when you look at the active ingredients, what you see is this through a line of being able to hold, as you say, horrors of combat, but at the same time, be able to function

Steve Martorano 
and on a more mundane, everyday level, you know, wake up, you know, you're not really happy with your job or, you know, you're worried economically but you know, you put your shoes on, and you go to work you get through the day moving on where others might be paralyzed, and in deep depression.

Matt Sosnowsky  
Yesterday, there was actually a great quote that I wanted to dig up before our podcasts, and I couldn't track it down. But it talks all about how resilient soldiers and this is not always within our control, but we can cultivate skills around resiliency. But talked about seeing combat as a complex challenge that they have to manage that is extremely high stakes. Now, that sounds like a special individual to me, that can be in the fog of war and see things like that. But if you dial that back to a civilian context, I think what you're describing is right, which is to not deny the things that we see that we perceive as unjust, terrifying, cruel, and unfair, but not allow it To or to intervene so that it doesn't rob us of our sense of agency.

Steve Martorano 
Yes, exactly. I guess it one on one level, the beginning of despair, and depression is the sense that nothing matters. That's exactly right.

Matt Sosnowsky 
So we need to we talked about that cognitive triad before and you start to think I'm a bad person. The world is broken. And, you know, we're doomed. And naturally, what will flow from that is apathy or just complete nihilism. And, you know, some people can have that philosophy in good faith, but for other people, it's a symptom of depression, and it's often accessing the kind of darkest parts of ourselves

Steve Martorano 
I don't think we're talking to Matt Sosnowsky.  Am I doing your name justice, Sosnowsky?

Matt Sosnowsky
That works.

Steve Martorano
Matt Sosnowsky is a psychotherapist. This first-time investment is professional in your field. This question, given what we've just talked about this notion of flexibility, is this notion of two people looking at the same difficult situation, one can be traumatized, and the other seems to roll with the punch. Is ignorance bliss?

Matt Sosnowsky 
That's a great question. There are studies on that. And the short answer is yes.

Steve Martorano 
You know, sometimes I look at people that at first blush, I would go, well, that's a chatter, heady, you know, floating around out here, like, you know, and then you go, Well, I don't know. You know, we're all going to end up in the same place. And that guy seems okay.

Matt Sosnowsky 
Chatter head I'd like to be it's true. The smarter you are, oftentimes the more complexity you hold, and therefore the more burdened you feel. It's a double-edged sword. To be sure.

Steve Martorano 
You also mentioned in our on our pre conversations about this longitudinal study that I've read a little bit about coming out of Penn, where they've been looking at a lot of people over a very long period of time. I think it's 80 years or something, something like that. Yeah. Can you summarize briefly what they're seeing? Are we feeling better about the future in spite of mounting uncertainty? Are we the same? What are we finding out?

Matt Sosnowsky 
You know, I think that study is, it might be more valuable for what we can glean about how to manage this uncertainty because it because it's longitudinal, I think it's telling us more about the, you know, the past 30 years than maybe what, what's happened over the past couple decades. But from what I understand, it's sort of interesting. I think, initially, it was two independent studies that were conducted. In a vacuum, unbeknownst to one another, the researchers are conducting studies, one on an essentially privileged population, and one on an underprivileged population. And then I believe this is sort of a meta-analysis of the results. And the primary takeaway, that this is, is about as high level as, as it gets, in terms, of what the researchers found. But what I'm seeing in interviews and summaries of the book they put recently published called the good life, I believe, is that connection has the highest correlation with physical and mental health and also life satisfaction. So, people, two people, can actually, have a relationship. So I think that's really relevant in a micro sense, in terms of, you know, our closest family and friends. But I see it as well as an emphasis on community which I did not just think and see but have seen research on the kind of deterioration of community,

Steve Martorano 
again, if they see if they're seeing a long-term benefit to connection and connectivity among people, family, friends, and organizations. As we get deeper into what I'm reading, is more and more isolation. It's the irony of social media is that it has not built a community it has isolated us. You see a lot of young people who spend a lot of time on social media. What do you tell the kids on the cutback do you say, you know, you're lonely because you think you have 250 friends on Facebook, and they're not your friends? Are they just peed on a screen? Do you tell people to back off on some of this?

Matt Sosnowsky 
Absolutely, yeah. The term that comes up most often is empty calories. So you people will say, you know, Doom scrolling and fall down a Twitter rabbit hole, or I have gotten sort of a senseless argument from somebody I knew 15 years ago in high school, who clearly has different beliefs than I do, and we're just in this unconstructive conflict online right behind the keyboard and I absolutely We endorse detoxing from social media particularly, then folks self identify that notion of empty calories is a phrase I throw out, but almost immediately if that's what's going on, it's for sure they know it. They know that kills the time, but in ways that just leave you feeling like you have a stomach ache after. Well, it's

Steve Martorano 
just It's remarkable. I think it's subtle, and people don't really appreciate what's happening to them. But I've been reading about the effect of ghosting. You know, ghosting, of course, is when you have a communication virtually over social media. And then, for whatever reason, the person stops communicating with you with no explanation. None whatsoever, they just ghost you. And the articles I've been reading say the effect of that is to cause people anxiety, depression, and confusion. Why have they stopped being my friend? Can you tell me my take on that? Well, first of all, they weren't really your friend. In any meaningful sense. So why are you taking it so hard? But you see that phenomenon? Right? Yeah,

Matt Sosnowsky 
I do. And it's an interesting parallel to radical uncertainty because it talks about the nature by which we fill in gaps that don't have concrete explanations or, you know, clear contours. And typically, when there's a void, or often when there's a void, we fill it with our biggest fears and anxiety. So if somebody doesn't reply, what did I say the wrong thing? Did I not look the right way that I did something to offend them? When you look at the future, and you don't know what's going to happen? Oftentimes, the inclination is, am I going to be safe, or are my friends gonna retire?

Steve Martorano 
Have you seen the movie The banshees have intervened yet? With

Matt Sosnowsky 
that? I have. I'm married to an Irish lass. So So that's, that's

Steve Martorano  
my scene, you must have seen every Irish movie. My wife loves them, too. We love them. We love Irish movies. But anyway, without giving anything away, it is about in a very untechnical way, because it took place 100 years ago, right? Yeah, about 100 years ago, in this little village in Ireland, were two great friends. One just says that's it, we're done. With no explanation. We're just done. And it crushes the other fellow. And I thought, what a metaphor. First of all, it had to do with, I'm sure it had to do with the Irish situation at that time. But it was a sort of, for me anyway, an echo of what was going on. I mean, you know, people see friendships disappearing, and it kills them. Yes,

Matt Sosnowsky 
you experienced this too. But as a viewer, I found it, especially the first half of the movie, before you get a little more clarity about what's going on. But I found it very kind of upsetting and

Steve Martorano 
troubling. Yeah, absolutely. You looked at the behavior of the fellow who broke off the relationship. And it's, it's incomprehensible, and it angers you, you know, you can't treat people like this. But of course, that's not the story is about how the other fella handles it. That's not so much what the active guys were doing. I think there are a couple of things I want to get to I don't want to keep you forever. But just this final notion about you mentioned existential psychotherapy. In a nutshell, because we'll have you back, what are we talking about?

Matt Sosnowsky 
Yes. So maybe I can tie together that resilience conversation with some action steps and even existential psychotherapy, but so, I was thinking about this topic prior to coming on. And that came to mind existential psychotherapy, which courses has its roots, in existentialism existentialist philosophy. And in psychotherapy, they identify four fundamental concerns, fears, and truths, but Mindjet serves as maybe the safest language. And that's death and mortality, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom. These are the four sort of immutable aspects of the human experience that we all hold. And this maybe goes back as well to the idea of is ignorance bliss. But you know, anybody who is introspective at all, I think, sort of grapples with one or several of those truths from time to time, or quite often, depending on how introspective you are. And the answer is not simple. And the solution is not simple. But in the face of this uncertainty, first is confronting it or at least looking these things in the face and not hiding from them, which I think is really important. And it goes back to that idea of checking that we're not being slowly boiled. And what we do about it, at least in existential theory, and connect central psychotherapy is to do to pave our own way to make our own meaning. And to me, you know, to use different language that comes back to me to the idea of locus of control, right? So what can you influence in your life? What is out of your control? And, you know, without understanding that you can't fix all these things, and maybe these things that we can't control will adversely affect us, maybe, maybe not, we can accept that reality, and also make our own way make our own meaning, make our own choices. And ideally, this idea of resilience, right, holds two truths at once. Ideally, that's the best part. Yeah,

Steve Martorano 
it's an expression. I mean, I am certainly familiar with existentialism, but I didn't know that. It's a therapeutic technique that was so widely available. Let me ask you one other thing. And then we can we can kind of wrap this thing up. And then off to use the expression, be in the moment, be here now. Is that a real thing? Is that something people really should be focusing on? Because it seems to me in a nutshell, what we're talking about is in spite of this uncertainty, in spite of everything, all the forces working chaotically in our lives, this is the moment that counts. I mean, what Faulkner said the past is not dead. In fact, it's never passed. Always with us the past. And conversely, the future never arrives. It's never the future. It's just now. Now is this is it just now? Do we need to focus more now on our mental health than ever?

Matt Sosnowsky 
Yeah, I think so. I think that's a great point. I mean, there's always a balance. And maybe one day, next time I want, I could talk about this study, but it's about how we relate to the past, present and future and where we derive the most life satisfaction and sometimes the most distress. But I think within the topic of, of this radical uncertainty, that idea of the hearing now, that idea of locus of control, and making choices that promote, you know, that reflects who we are, our center of gravity or values, I think, yeah, I think you're spot on. And there's tremendous wisdom in there. And if I could throw out another turn of phrase that we use in our family in a lot of contexts, but particularly against the backdrop of uncertainty, is the idea, I believe, Hemingway a Moveable Feast, right? So beyond just locus of control, what can you control? But Where's that coming from? Right? Do you know your core values? Do you know? And what are you about to define those things you reflect on them? And do you behave in a way that reflects who you are, and who you want to be to the people around you? I think there's a certain tremendous, not just constellation, but empowerment in the idea of having that center of gravity and behaving in concert with those values, such that we can be a Moveable Feast. Maybe sometimes that feast is a little sparser

Steve Martorano 
and have another son. The situation is complex, but some of the solutions seem very simple. And very fun and very fundamental. If you can just get down to them that says an ASCII Philadelphia talk therapy, how long ago did you start your accompany your practice, I should say.

Matt Sosnowsky 
During the pandemic in 2020, I was part of a group practice in DC, and when my wife, daughter, and I decided to move back to Philly, I rolled off that practice and opened my own. So excited and happy back in Philly. But of course, still, many of my clients are still serving DC, Maryland, Virginia. Now that we're in this hybrid remote,

Steve Martorano 
yeah. Yeah. And did the return to Philadelphia, for your practice and your family, didn't at all coincide with the fortunes of the football team? Is inquiry increasing dramatically?

Matt Sosnowsky 
Yeah. Once we got that first one, you know, Steve, I don't know if you feel the same way. But that one was the big one. It's all gravy from here.

Steve Martorano 
You only tell people about that game. There have been lots of losses in Philadelphia that were crushing. And they stay with us, unfortunately, but not more so than the most recent loss because, unlike every other loss, I've ever seen that. That was the one that always is the one that got away right there. Or the taking it. We lost it anyway, Matt. People want more information about you. And your practice. We'll have some numbers up there for it as well. You got a website and all that, right? You're, you're taking clot, you're taking patients, right?

Matt Sosnowsky 
I am. Yep. I just expanded my hour. So daytime, evenings, and weekends are available in person. And remotely.

Steve Martorano 
Both in Philadelphia and DC for the remote stuff?

Matt Sosnowsky 
Yep, remote in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. And then I have an office here in Philadelphia. So I can serve both preferences here for the clients in Philadelphia as well as New Jersey.

Steve Martorano 
Right, Matt. Thank you for your time. I you know, we only have a little time here. And this, the radical uncertainty we tried to tackle remains. Maybe we made it a little less scary. I hope so. Matt says Now see, again, Philadelphia Talk Therapy. You haven't received a standing invitation to come to this program. Anytime you want to talk about anything you want. I think you're up. You're plugged into a lot of what young people, and everybody else for that matter, are struggling with right now and extraordinary time, and in our lives, pandemics, wars, and all of that. Thanks for joining us on the behavior corner. Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Steve, for having me. And you guys as well. Don't forget, you know the drill, like us. Follow us, although I'm a little paranoid about being followed, that's okay. Push the subscription button. Do whatever it takes to join us on the Behavioral Corner. We'll catch you next time.

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