Do as I say if you want, but please, for the love of god—don't do as I've done.
All of the shit I wish I knew a year ago, as lessons from my first year in private practice
In October, I celebrated one official year in my private practice (I started the LLC in August but started taking clients a bit later).
Lots of folks will take themselves out for a fancy dinner, or a party with friends, or at the very least an impromptu photo shoot for social media to mark the 1-year milestone for their businesses.
I don’t think I did much more than look at the calendar and say to myself, “huh. it’s been a year since i started this thing. cool, i guess.” I don’t remember going out to dinner about it. I don’t remember making a fuss at home. I think I might’ve posted about it somewhere—Instagram maybe? I’m not sure.
This isn’t because I’m not proud (?) or happy (?) about running a practice of my own for a year (you can tell by the question marks that I’m not sure if those are the emotions I feel about it all). No… I do feel positively about the fact that I made it through 12 consecutive months of owning and operating my own business, being my own boss, handling client care and communication on my own, and coming out the other side with a lot of new and important lessons for myself. I did a thing and objectively speaking, I didn’t fail. So that, at the very least, can make me feel proud.
But, it’s more complicated than that. Truth be told, my feelings are conflicting and complex. I am simultaneously surprised and delighted, as well as confused and disillusioned. I feel this way because the past year has been full of some of the most expansive and heart-opening positives, the most anger-inducing and gut-punchy negatives, and the most boring, stupid, normal neutrals of my working life. The biggest difference being that instead of some organization or employer being at the helm, it was just me, and I was suddenly in charge of all the damn decisions, and it was a lot to handle.
And among the bright spots, there are dark spots, as well. What I haven’t talked about is that around the February - April time period of this year, things were feeling very up and down and, at times, quite dark for me. The weirdest part was that some of my most “successful” months were accompanied by the most emptied-out, soul-voiding, existentially dreadful feeling I’d experienced in years.
Y’all… I was not good.
And it wasn’t anything that happened all of a sudden. It was, for lack of a better term, a slow burn.
After sessions were done for the day or week, I’d find myself struggling to balance my zeal for all of the exciting new shit I wanted to work on, with the drag of all the unsexy but necessary aspects of running a business. Add into the mix the anxiety of never truly knowing what my caseload was going to look like month by month (sometimes week by week) and feeling like I was trying desperately to grab onto a sense of normalcy.
This tension would grow over the course of weeks and weeks, and I’d inevitably find myself miserably behind on notes, pointlessly scrolling online, and totally overwhelmed with my own brain. It was everything and nothing all at the same time,
Cue the up-and-down of excitement leading to overwork and a total crash in energy and enthusiasm—all of the entrepreneur-brain anxiety inevitably leading to a fuck-it-all depression.
I’m being quite serious when I tell you this: starting your own practice will be as self-revealing and self-transformative as going through school to become a mental health professional, in different ways.
Being your own boss will stretch you in ways unimaginable. Being your own boss in a field that is mired in the shit-talking of shaming ourselves and others for daring to make sure our needs are met first—via scheduling, policies, fees, specializing, etc—will stretch you even further.
But it doesn’t have to be agony. It doesn’t have to tear you up. I’d like you to entertain the idea that you can simultaneously be a kind, compassionate, kickass clinician who does awesome work with their clients, AND you can also be a savvy business owner who knows how to make decisions that positively impact the business and the most important asset it has: you, the therapist.
To that end, I’ve compiled a non-comprehensive list of some of my biggest pieces of advice for private practice hopefuls. It’s my, “Do as I say if you want, but please, dear god, don’t do as I’ve done” list. These are suggestions based off of my own experience and the things I’ve heard from my 1:1 consultation clients, as well.
Take a read, pick up what suits you, and leave the rest:
Please, do:
Get support, regularly, and lots of it.
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