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A Key to Something
Where therapy meets writing.
Essays and reflections on mindfulness, identity, and the practice of paying attention — from Lex E. Santí, LCSW, and the A Key Therapy team.
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A Key Therapy Featured in The Trumansburg Free Press
A Key Therapy, our new mindfulness-based group practice, was featured in The Trumansburg Free Press on September 9, 2026.
Lex Santí
6 days ago1 min read
A Key Therapy Welcomes Molly Alexander, LMSW, as Clinician
Molly Alexander, LMSW, has joined A Key Therapy and is accepting new clients: children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families, by secure video across New York State.
Lex Santí
Oct 92 min read
The Good Time Coming
By Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA, DSW-S. Clinical Director, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC. Co-founder, The Quad. In the 1840s, whenever Ezra Cornell came home to Ithaca between telegraph ventures, the town's merchants and mechanics brought him their bills: groceries, notions, the family's shoes, some unpaid for years. He was stringing lines from New England to Wisconsin. He asked for more time, made a small payment, or offered a note. His biographer Philip Dorf explains that the for
Lex Santí
Sep 2812 min read
A Key Therapy — Media Kit
Press, speaking, and referral partnership information About A Key Therapy A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC is a mindfulness-based group therapy practice offering secure telehealth across New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia. Founded by Lex E. Santí, LCSW, the practice works with students, young adults, and adults navigating anxiety, depression, grief, burnout, life transitions, and identity questions — with mindfulness-based therapy as the specialty, not a side offering. The
Lex Santí
Sep 22 min read
A Key Therapy Launches in Trumansburg, Serving Clients in Four States
The mindfulness-based telehealth practice, founded by Ithaca clinician Lex E. Santí, LCSW, is licensed in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia, and is hiring. TRUMANSBURG, N.Y., August 18th, 2026. A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC, a mindfulness-based group practice, will officially launch September 4th, 2026, from Trumansburg. Its clinicians and coaches see clients in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Virginia by secure telehealth. The website is found at www.akeytherapy.co
Lex Santí
Aug 184 min read
When Difference Is Mistaken for Resistance: Why Some Clients Leave Therapy Before It Ever Begins
Lex E Santí, LCSW, DSW-S, Clinical Director of A Key Therapy Every therapist has experienced it. A client attends an intake session, perhaps one follow-up, and then disappears. Phone calls go unanswered. Emails receive no reply. The case is closed with a familiar notation: client discontinued treatment. We often ask why clients leave therapy after they are gone. A more important question may be whether they ever felt understood in the first place. Research consistently shows
Lex Santí
Aug 14 min read
The Space Between Clinician and Human
Developing boundaries as a therapist needs to happen before it is too late. Lex E Santí, LCSW, Clinical Director, A Key Therapy It was Halloween. Six, maybe seven years ago. I was driving home on Perry City Road, about three miles from my house, coming off a shift at Family and Children's of Ithaca. It might have been my first year working there, before A Key Therapy, this private practice, before the novel, before most of what has since become my life. I was learning somethi
Lex Santí
May 126 min read
Thunder Road and the Song of the Midnight Rider
The lineage that my novel comes from, The Song of the Midnight Rider, goes directly to the original road movie, Thunder Road from 1958. A movie so powerful and fierce that it took Robert Mitchum producing it himself to make it work.
Lex Santí
May 73 min read
I Keep Coming Back
On Pallas, the people, and why this place keeps calling me home by Lex E. Santí, LCSW, MFA On May 3rd, from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, I’m doing something vulnerable: my first real public reading of The Song of the Midnight Rider at Pallas Fitness. My debut novel. The one I’ve been working on, in one form or another, for twenty years. I’m doing it here—not a bookstore, not a library, not a stage with a podium and strangers in folding chairs—because this gym has shaped the last
Lex Santí
Apr 275 min read
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