The family was devoted to Maier, though they knew very little about her. The boys remember attending art films and picking wild strawberries as her charges, but they don’t recall her ever mentioning any family or friends. Their parents knew that Maier traveled—they would hire a replacement nanny in her absence—but they didn’t know where she went.
“You really wouldn’t ask her about it at all,” Nancy Gensburg, the boys’ mother, told Chicago magazine in 2010. “I mean, you could, but she was private. Period.”

If you are attending therapy for something that is timely – to help you deal with a particular problem or difficult phase in your life – then you can finish therapy whenever you feel you have met your goal. For example, if you are going through a nasty breakup, grieving a loved one, or trying to save a relationship, then you finish therapy once you have worked through those emotions and have the tools to move forward.

It can be more difficult to know when to quit therapy when the problem is ongoing. Mental illness typically is not something that can be “fixed” or “cured” with treatment. The goal, then, is not just achieving a state of emotional or psychological wellness but also maintaining that state.

It can help to break therapy down into two phases: the acute phase and the maintenance phase.

“Therapy is helpful to people in all stages of life, not only those who are in crisis,” Mishay Butler-Ozore, LMFT, a therapist in Southern California, tells SELF. But how can you know if “people” is you and that stage of life is now? Here, experts explain the benefits of ongoing—or “maintenance”—therapy, how to decide if it’s right for you, and what you can expect in your sessions when life is…pretty good.

“Yeah, right,” I said to myself as I tapped out my affirmative reply. The odds are already long for any particular place on Earth to be struck by orbital debris—so the chances for it to happen practically in the backyard of someone like me who studies the issue felt astronomically low, simply too far-fetched to be true.
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But the initial response was subdued; most journalists didn’t prioritize following up on a rural Saskatchewan farmer saying he found a piece of space junk. Sawchuk gave me permission to pass along his phone number to curious minds, with one proviso: “I won’t respond to texts while I’m driving the tractor!”
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What on Earth is a Canadian citizen supposed do if they find potentially hazardous space garbage on their private property? How does one tell SpaceX, notorious for being unresponsive to journalist queries, a piece of their spacecraft fell on your farm? Who has to clean it up?

The answers, I found, are completely bizarre.

Scientists used to think that our bladders were ruled by a relatively straightforward reflex — an “on-off” switch between storing urine and letting it go. “Now we realize it’s much more complex than that,” says Valentino, now director of the division of neuroscience and behavior at the National Institute of Drug Abuse. An intricate network of brain regions that contribute to functions like decision-making, social interactions and awareness of our body’s internal state, also called interoception, participates in making the call.

In addition to being mind-bogglingly complex, the system is also delicate.