You can’t please everyone, so fuck it.

My mom says I was born to be in the business of helping others.

I got awards at school for befriending others on the playground that didn’t have friends. I was a peer helper in high school.

Try as I might, I did not want to become a therapist. I had the idea that I couldn’t survive as a therapist. I was told that if you wanted to be a therapist you were supposed to help people, practically for free. Do you want to work for free? I don’t. Although I really did, for a lot of my career. AmeriCorps, Peace Corps, and non-profit work. I put in a lot of time, lots that I didn’t get paid for. Long hours that didn’t add up. I worked 2 jobs in college, one overnight at a home for pregnant teens, and daytime with homeless youth and barely scraped by.

“Helping people doesn’t pay the bills.” My grandmother would constantly tell me and insisted that I was going to have to live in a trailer park because I was never going to make enough money to live in a real house. Guess what? I live in a real house and never have lived in a trailer park except in AmeriCorps!

In fact, I decided to become a therapist when I found out I actually did feel like it helped people AND you could make a decent living. But the decent living part was the part that a lot of my peers shamed me for. I worked my ass off for years trying to get my credentials together so that I could actually open my own practice. Finally when I did, I left my stable full time job to do it instead. I saw 27 people a week. It might not sound like a lot, but listening while paying attention to words, tone of voice, posture, and remembering what the client has told you the past 6 months you’ve been seeing them is impossible. But it is what I had to do in order to “make a decent living” or at least be able to pay the bills. I took insurance, and it doesn’t pay enough. I was distracted by the pressure of feeling like I couldn’t pay my own bills while listening to my clients talk about the 2 week vacation they took in Tahiti. I couldn’t even take a week off.

So I went off insurance panels.

People had a LOT to say about that. They said I was only going to be able to see rich people. I wasn’t going to be “accessible” for people that really need the services. I was too expensive and “out of reach” for many people. I made a commitment to the helping profession and I was turning my back on it. I even had a friend say, “I don’t know, I just feel bad for everyone that can’t afford you.” She changed her tune when I asked if perhaps her husband, who makes 6 figures in IT should perhaps lower his salary requirements so that he could help some organizations that couldn’t afford him. She answered, “Of course not.” I told her that is essentially what she was saying I should do.

Here’s the thing…. not everyone is going to be happy with what you decide. That doesn’t mean it’s the wrong decision.

I don’t lose sleep about some person from an insurance company who doesn’t even know my client or what kind of therapist I am, deciding I need to return money from sessions already done because they don’t think what we did will help my client (called a ‘clawback’ look that up!). I don’t lose sleep about waiting weeks to be paid from an insurance company and sometimes even longer when they have a privacy breach and benefits can’t be verified (a real thing many of my colleagues have had happen recently and had to shut down their practices because of!)

If I listened to other people, I would be a horrible therapist and forget everything about my clients or be so stressed out that I couldn’t possibly do good work with them.

I’m taking care of myself because that is what I teach my clients to do for themselves.

I can charge someone less when I want to because they can’t pay my full fee, without overloading my practice.

I do what I want, when I want. I dictate what I am willing to work for and how I will work.

The reality is that people will talk shit because of their own shit. The people who have criticized me have usually been the people who feel worse about themselves. They project that onto me.

SO here is some work for you….

If no one’s opinions about you mattered, what would your life look like?
Would you be divorced? Would you not communicate with your family? Would you leave your job? Would you not follow through with all of your responsibilities?

Consider doing it. Because no matter what you do, people will have opinions about it.

I’m personally really glad that I did what I wanted to. I love my life. I love my job. I get up every day thankful for my work and that I get to work with amazing people who are willing to invest in themselves too. In fact, some of my clients have asked for more money from employers or gotten better jobs in order to pay me my fee because they wanted to see me. They leveled up because I did too.

So fuck it, I am going to continue to do what I want and I don’t care what anyone says about it.