A between-session support tool for clients with anxious attachment, limerence, and compulsive checking.
Your clients understand the pattern. They've named it, mapped it, worked through it with you. The urge doesn't care. In the exact moment — the check, the spiral, the message they're about to send — the pull is stronger than anything they've learned.
Paused is a real-time awareness tool built for that gap.
We're building a practitioner beta with a small group of therapists. If what's described below fits your client work, we'd like to hear from you.
↓ See what’s involved before you applyThe message they sent at midnight. The profile they checked forty times. The spiral that started Sunday and arrived in your office Tuesday.
You work with what arrives. You understand the pattern deeply. But between sessions — in the exact moment the pull is strongest — there's nothing meeting them there.
You piece together what happened from what your client remembers, what they're willing to share, and how activated they still are when they sit down. That's the gap Paused is built for.
The urge shows up — they open Paused.
Built for the moment, not for reflection. No ritual. No setup. Just something that’s there when the pull is.
Name what’s happening.
Selecting what’s pulling at them moves them from automatic to aware. That shift — from inside the urge to observing it — is itself the first thing. It’s already meaningful work.
Wait with it. Then choose.
A short, timed pause creates space between them and the action. Not a wall — a window. From there, they decide.
When a client connects their therapist in Paused, you get a view into the week. No transcript. No journal. Just the pattern — with their consent, visible in a way it usually isn’t until Tuesday.
Not as a compliance check. As a signal. A client who opened Paused five times this week and a client who didn’t open it once are walking into your session very differently. You know which one you’re meeting before they say a word.
How many moments. Whether they paused or acted — the ratio, not the detail. What was pulling at them most. Enough to skip the ten minutes of “so how was your week” and go straight to what matters.
Clients edit, minimise, forget, or protect. The pattern data doesn’t. It shows what happened. That’s not surveillance — it’s context, given with consent.
No cost to you. No cost to them.
The mechanic isn’t new — it draws from principles in ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), DBT-informed urge work, and behavioural pattern interruption. Frameworks your clients have likely already encountered in your work together.
The pause asks them to notice the urge rather than act on it. To watch it rise, hold, and pass. The app creates the conditions; the client does the work.
Between the urge and the action, there is a space. Paused is built to widen that space — to make choosing possible where before it felt automatic.
The timed pause functions as a held moment with a defined end. Not suppression. Not distraction.
Naming the trigger type is itself the interruption. Moving from automatic to aware is meaningful, even if nothing else follows.
For clients with checking patterns, the moment of pausing and deciding whether to act mirrors the kind of response awareness many practitioners already work toward.
Paused isn’t a therapeutic tool. It holds the moment until you can.
Paused is built for patterns where the gap between insight and behaviour is the central challenge. If your clients understand what’s happening and still can’t interrupt it in the moment, this is designed for them.
Hypervigilance to tone, protest behaviours, difficulty tolerating uncertainty, reassurance-seeking that doesn’t resolve the anxiety.
Involuntary intrusive thoughts, fantasy cycling, replaying interactions, reading meaning into neutral signals.
Profile checking, re-reading conversations, monitoring read receipts, tracking someone’s activity without being able to stop.
Seeking certainty about the relationship or partner, reassurance loops, reviewing for signs of wrongness or rightness.
The simultaneous pull toward and away from connection, often acted on impulsively in either direction.
The urge to check, reach out, or revisit after separation. The loop that runs especially hard at night and on weekends.
The urge to fix, explain, or seek reassurance immediately after a perceived slight or disconnection, before the window for repair has passed.
Difficulty tolerating a partner’s separateness; the urge to close distance, monitor, or intervene when none is needed.
If your clients know they’re doing it and can’t stop — Paused is for that moment.
Not a generic wellness app. The framing is specific to compulsive checking, limerence, anxious attachment, and the patterns adjacent to them. It doesn't contradict your approach — it extends it into the hours you can't reach.
Zero friction when the urge is live. No journaling. No ritual to remember. Clients who abandon every other wellness tool tend to use this one — because it asks nothing of them except to wait.
There's no financial relationship between Paused and the practitioners who refer it. You recommend it because you've used it, you believe it's right for certain clients, and you've seen what it surfaces between sessions. That's the only reason it should ever be in your hands.
It doesn’t replace the work. It keeps the work alive between sessions.
If this fits your client work, apply for the beta ↓
This is a small beta by design. We’re not looking for volume — we’re looking for practitioners whose feedback will shape how the features develop.
Spots are limited. We review each application and respond to every one personally.
The gap between sessions is the part of this problem I keep coming back to. Clients leave a session with something — an insight, a frame, a felt sense of what's happening. Then Sunday comes. The urge is stronger than the insight. And there's nothing there.
Paused is my attempt to put something there. But how it works for practitioners — what's visible, what's useful, what protects the relationship — I don't want to build that alone.
The people in this beta will determine what it becomes. If you're working with clients caught between knowing and acting, I'd like to build this with you.
— Renée, founderPaused is designed specifically for limerence, anxious attachment, compulsive checking, and adjacent relational patterns — not as a general wellness tool. It’s built for the moment the urge is live, not for reflection after. You can recommend it to clients who understand the pattern but can’t interrupt it in the moment.
The practitioner view is consent-based — clients connect their therapist within the app. What you see is pattern data: frequency, ratio of paused vs. acted moments, and what was pulling at them. No transcripts, no content, no surveillance. Clients can disconnect at any time.
It’s not a therapeutic tool and doesn’t position itself as one. Paused holds the moment between sessions — it’s designed to extend the work you’re already doing into the hours you can’t reach. The insight happens in your room. Paused is there for the moment before your client acts against it.
If what you’ve read fits your client work, tell us about your practice. We review every application and respond personally.
You’re in.
We’ll be in touch personally. In the meantime — if you know a colleague who works with the same presentations, we’d be glad to hear from them too.
Looking for Paused for yourself? For individuals →