Confidentiality & data sovereignty

You can't be honest in a room you don't trust.

Joy only works if you can say the hard thing out loud. These are the boundaries that make that possible.

Your sessions are yours

Every conversation is stored against your account and served only to a request carrying your httpOnly session cookie. There is no public link, no shared feed, and no way for another client to reach your reading.

Therapist access is opt-in, by you

A therapist can only see your sessions if you entered their email when you created your account. Remove that link and their access ends. Therapists never see clients who did not name them.

Not used to train anyone's model

Your transcripts are sent to the analysis model to produce your reading and are not used to train it. We do not sell, broker, or advertise against your conversations — ever.

Delete means delete

Deleting a session removes the transcript and its analysis from our database. Only the account that created a session can delete it.

A clinical note, not a diagnosis

Joy offers a reflective reading grounded in Gottman, Nonviolent Communication, Emotion-Focused Therapy, Pradeep Prakash's Cycle of Suffering and Spiral of Liberation, Seligman, Scheier & Carver and Dember on optimism, the psychology of religion and coping (James, Pargament, Rosmarin, Krause) on trust, and the standard defence-mechanism literature (APA Dictionary, StatPearls, Bion). It is not therapy, not a clinical assessment, and not a crisis service. If you or your partner are unsafe, contact 988 (US) or your local emergency number.

Joy

A reflective companion for couples, groups and their therapists. Joy is not a substitute for professional care or crisis support.

Grounded in

Gottman's Four Horsemen & the 5:1 ratio

Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication

Emotion-Focused Therapy

Pradeep Prakash's Cycle of Suffering & Spiral of Liberation

Bion's Experiences in Groups

Optimism & trust

Seligman's explanatory style

Scheier & Carver's dispositional optimism

Dember's optimism-pessimism scale

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Pargament's religious coping & the Brief RCOPE

Rosmarin and Krause on trust in God

Rotter's interpersonal trust · Bandura's self-efficacy

Defence mechanisms after the APA Dictionary of Psychology and StatPearls (NCBI)

If you are in crisis

Call or text 988 (US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or your local emergency number.

Defence mechanism glossaryConfidentiality charter