That therapist identity…

is strong tho.

Seriously, I don’t think I’ve encountered another profession in which a person’s work so wholly integrates into their sense of self.

And I actually think this is really beautiful. I mean, it’s this sense of calling that urges us to make people’s lives - and the world - better.

We dedicate ourselves to following the latest research, learning the most appropriate and effective modalities, and advocating for our clients. So that the work we do on a daily basis is the most impactful we can possibly make it. We truly drive change.

But, being a change-agent often comes at a cost.

With long hours, low pay, and heavy stories, there really are occupational hazards to being a therapist.

Because giving everything to our profession and our caseload to the detriment of ourselves doesn’t make us superheroes. It makes us martyrs.

So what happens when we want to unbraid this therapist identity a bit? What happens when we want to weave in something new? And how do we do it without negating the helper within us?

In this episode, I’m challenging the belief that therapists are selfish for wanting more and explaining how I designed the Person-Centered Passions workshop to capitalize on the best parts of being a helper while still pursuing your desire for something more.

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Show Notes:

Hey, Risers. Welcome to Empathy Rising. I wanna jump into the episode today and talk about one of the core misguided beliefs that therapists hold onto, and that is the idea that it is selfish to want to do more than help people.

If I could drum up enough spare time, I wanna do an unofficial study on professional identity because I seriously don't know many other occupations where a person's job title becomes so integrated with their way of life other than therapists, and probably the other helping professions. If anybody has any research on this, send it my way because I think this is fascinating.

This is what came up over and over again at Therapy Reimagined was the therapist's identity, and on one hand, everybody was owning it and rocking it. Woohoo, we're all therapists.

On the other hand, we were starting to see the shadow of that or the darker side of that and Tiffany McClain's keynote speech was one place where we saw this a lot. I'm gonna be talking about her speech a little bit throughout this episode.

Literally my corporate career, I was surrounded by financial professionals and marketing professionals, and I could tell you firsthand that investment bankers are not sitting around the dinner table fretting and worrying about every stock portfolio that they manage, and if it's gonna be okay until next week.

I know that we're supposed to work on transference and countertransference and all that stuff, but you can't tell me that our career is not heavy, and you can't tell me that being a therapist doesn't affect you. I'm talking about this in just a little bit, but I think we really care about our clients and we really care about our field.

There's a calling and a sense of purpose to what we do. That is one of the things that happened during Tiffany's keynote was that someone called out from the audience that they literally can't not be a helper. By that, they meant if they made no money or even if they had to pay money, they would still find a way to show up and hold space for others and be that help.

Tiffany did a great job of exploring things like Family of Origin and where some of this therapy or therapist identity comes from, but I really can't think of many other professionals that if it came down to eating or paying their bills, would not find another job or another field.

We are so apt to just stick with what we are doing or stay at a low-paying agency or stay with insurance panels or whatever it is in order to provide therapy and to help.

While I think this is certainly admirable and noble, another point that Tiffany made so well during her speech was the idea of martyrdom. That because of our calling to our field therapists will sacrifice our well-being in order to help others.

Since you're listening to this show, I know that isn't necessarily you. You have been able to break some of that low rate or low wage or maybe some of that martyred mentality where you're supposed to sacrifice yourself for your caseload.

I know that you've got an entrepreneurial spark and that you're wanting to evolve on the couch, but I do think that this therapist identity follows us when we're ready to branch out and when we're ready to try something new.

Because no matter how prepared we think we are to branch out, when we start going from thinking about it, thinking about our course, thinking about our membership site, thinking about coaching or whatever it is, when we go from thinking about it to actually doing it, a lot of angst comes up and even a lot of guilt comes up.

I see this in my students firsthand all of the time. In fact, I actually even did an informal poll the other day on my Instagram stories, and so these aren't even students of mine. They're just people who follow me on Instagram, and I asked if they felt like they were abandoning their therapist identity by thinking of adding an online income stream and all but one person answered yes.

Okay, so everybody who took the poll said that when they think about branching out or evolving or doing something else, or in addition to therapy, they feel guilty and they feel like they're abandoning a piece of their identity.

We can see ourselves doing something more, and we definitely want something more but what we haven't yet figured out is how to unbraid our therapist identity enough to weave something new without feeling negative feelings about that - and I really get it because our world is struggling right now.

All we have to do is turn on the news or hop on Facebook to see some other crazy, sad, terrible, whatever story. There are so many people who need our guidance and our support and our knowledge and our comradery, and this can definitely happen in therapy.

This can help people return to baseline. It can help people reach optimal functioning, and it can help those out there start to enjoy their life again, overcome their traumas, and overcome all of those things.

As therapists, we hold that space, but as the 10 billion plus dollar self-help industry shows us, many people are looking for something different. They're looking for a chance to blow their goals out of the water or a chance to skyrocket past their dreams. They're looking for results, mastery, growth, or community.

In that sense, they're looking for something like coaching or group programs, courses, or membership sites. My biggest thing is; why shouldn't we hold that space too? We are more than qualified. In fact, I think it plays well into our therapist's identity to be able to help people in another capacity.

But I think that it takes a little bit of humbleness and sometimes as therapists, we have to swallow that pride and admit that therapy isn't always the best solution, and that is a monumental thing to come face to face with.

We've spent years and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars getting ready for this, and we feel called for this, and we feel called to be a therapist, but to admit that therapy might not always be the right answer or might not be the best way to meet our client's where they're at, it's hard.

It's something that I think is controversial because I know that a lot of people out there and me included, say that everybody could benefit from therapy. I definitely think that, I definitely do agree with that. But we have consumers out there. We have people who are looking to spend their dollars in different ways. That's just a fact.

We also...this totally different topic, but the people who are spending their money consuming therapy are often looking for different types of therapists, right? Even if we keep it in our industry, we have to admit that people are shopping for therapists now, people are more prepared and more informed coming to therapy than ever before.

So why wouldn't they be more prepared and more informed when they're looking for a coach or when they're looking for a different type of solution, like a course or like a group program, right? So why not us and why shouldn't we hold that space?

Now for a long time, you guys have heard me - and we've talked together about how to create an online offer that's ethical.

That's important. It's important if we're maintaining our licenses, and I think even for those of us who are tiptoeing on letting our licenses go, we're tiptoe-toeing on moving away from therapy more, we still wanna be ethical. We're still called to be integral professionals and to operate with integrity.

We want to protect our license. We wanna increase our impact, we wanna increase our reach, and we've also looked at how to increase our income by designing offers that sell well. Because if we're doing this, if we're adding something on, if we're doing something new and extra, it needs to be worth it. It needs to be profitable.

We can now zoom out and we can see what it looks like to serve more people and we can see what it looks like to stop trading dollars for hours. We can daydream about that and imagine that we can think about what it would be like to bring in that extra cash to start attacking our student loans or if you're on the other side of the fence and you want to refine your caseload or maybe step away from therapy more, we can start to imagine that.

The time freedom, the financial freedom, all the things that we've talked about on this show before, it's so fun to sit back and to think about them and to daydream about them. While we can see it, and we can sometimes maybe even feel it, There's a big block sometimes to wondering or believing that we can do it.

Because here's what happens if you don't listen to that voice inside you, here's what happens if you don't listen to that urge for something... first of all, there's a lot of shame in that. You're going to cut yourself off from and deny a piece of yourself that's worth exploring and that's worth honoring.

You're essentially telling yourself that your dreams and your desires don't matter and they're not worth having. If you continue to believe that therapists don't do that kind of thing, if you continue to believe that I'm a therapist and I'm only meant to help people, you're essentially saying that the ability to help and serve is more important than any other piece of you.

That you're essentially bad for abandoning your caseload or bad for abandoning those who need you in the way that you've always shown up for them.

I think that's the key here because we're not asking you to stop helping. We're not asking you to stop showing up for and holding space for others. I'm just saying we can do it in a little bit of a different way.

We can continue to be therapists and serve our caseloads to the best of our ability, but we can also have an income stream that lightens the load, an income stream that makes us feel as if we're not so strapped or burdened by our caseload. We know what happens when we're strapped and burdened, right?

Not acknowledging or pursuing our inkling for something more is a direct route to the physical and mental exhaustion that comes from serving your clients. Serving your clients while not caring for yourself. Do we remember what that's called? It's called burnout. The overworked and overstressed feelings that come from limiting ourselves to one professional outlet.

Because if you aren't free to explore creatively or to find out which other ways you might like to make a difference in the world, you're gonna start resenting the crap outta your caseload. I think this is where we get stuck. We're resenting our clients, we're resenting our careers, and ultimately we're resenting ourselves for holding ourselves back.

If we are too ingrained in the therapist identity and too caught up with the shoulds, what a therapist should do, how a therapist should behave, how a therapist should help people, we're gonna be stuck in these places of shame, of burnout, and of resentment.

But if we could start to take a look at the way our therapist identity is weaved into our entire identity, if we can unbraid that a little bit, and unweave it a little bit, we can make room for a new thread. We can make room for something else and we can make room for something more.

This is the way that we craft that lighter lifestyle. We can take a look at making an ideal caseload, which might mean less clients and more quality work. If you have a course that's bringing you 500 bucks a month, how many fewer clients can you see?

How much more time are you getting back and how much more financial freedom do you feel because you don't have to see 25 or 30 clients a week? What about that stability? Something else that came up during Tiffany's talk was people who felt like they could never take a vacation or they could never take time off because they were so dependent on the time for hours.

If they were not in the therapy room for that hour, they were not making money. Having an online income stream makes room for this. You can turn the marketing up on your online income stream a month or two ahead of a planned vacation.

You can make more sales a couple of months ahead and then, you can leave your caseload for a week or two and go on that vacation because you have supplemented any income that is not going to be there because your butt is not in the chair.

Okay, so online income streams, yes, contribute to that lighter lifestyle, but they also add a sense of stability. God forbid you get into a car accident and you can't work for a couple of days, you lose money. You can literally not make money if you are not showing up to session.

Another income stream gives you that stability, and then in the same vein, it gives you some security because one other thing that came up during Tiffany's talk was the ability to save for retirement. I don't remember the statistic, but it was something staggering in the amount of therapists who are unable to save for retirement.

It's not working paycheck to paycheck, It's working session to session. As I just said, if you miss that hour, you miss that money and we need to fix that. We need therapists, this therapist identity to feel less burdened, to feel more stable, and to feel more secure.

But I also wanna bring in a little bit of fun. We get to use skills or talents that we might have kept on the back burner while we've been focused on playing by the rules of a therapist.

Maybe you do really love to teach, or maybe you really love to foster community and you haven't been able to do that as much in therapy, or maybe you've felt like you've embraced the should of a blank slate and you've kept pieces of yourself out of session, and now you're ready for to show those pieces of yourself. Now you're ready to be fully who you are.

We can do that with an online income stream. Okay, so yes, it's more stable. Yes, it's more secure. Yes, you get to shrink your caseload a bit, but it's also a way to have a little bit more fun and pursue things that the therapist's identity doesn't always let you pursue.

Hey, Risers, just a quick interruption to ask if you've joined us over in the Empathy Rising Facebook community yet. We are a tight-knit family of therapeutic entrepreneurs who are super passionate about building congruent practices and scaling beyond one-on-one work with soul-filling and sustainable online income streams.

Every day, we also hang out with and learn from other experts in and out of the therapy sphere to brand and expand our online presence. If you're ready to find your online home, come on over to facebook.com/groups/empathyrisingcommunity.com

If we're excited about the idea of doing, having, and being more than a typical therapist, but we don't wanna stop helping people altogether, how do we do that? How do we follow our passions in a person-centered way?

The first thing that we do is focus on those people. The idea of being selfish comes up when we focus too much on ourselves, but the online offer we create does not have to be solely for our gain.

It can still keep a focus on the needs of others, and I think that your experience as a therapist sets your online offer up to be more "other-focused" than the majority of other courses or group programs, or membership sites out there.

We have the chance to speak into our marketing, all of our clinical skills, so things like mirroring and things like summarization could show up on your sales page, and that customer is going to see themselves in your product and is going to see the way that you plan to help them in your offer.

Okay, so you have no idea how many sales pages I have seen that focus all on the program or all on the program creator and not on the needs of the customer. You won't do that because you have a special, unique take on the world, simply because you are a therapist, and see things differently than the majority, of course, creators or program creators out there- and you can bring those skills to your program.

Your helper identity and your years of being client-focused can translate to your online income stream and make sure that the curriculum and the marketing are centering around what it is the customer needs to experience real change.

The other thing that we can do is we can hone in on the wins. Often, our clinical clients achieve the most growth when we're not necessarily doing an actual intervention. Sometimes it's the auxiliary therapy skills or the auxiliary things that happen in session that can lead to a lot of growth.

How can we incorporate these into the online offer? We can't be doing therapy in our programs, we know that, but we can replicate some other aspects of the one-on-one work that are particularly helpful.

You might notice your clients might get a ton of insight from the psycho ed that you do, then you're gonna want a teaching element in your program. Some sort of instruction, if psycho-ed seems to land well with your clients. Then you might also sense that the relationship, the therapeutic relationship is a huge catalyst for your clients.

When you're translating this into something for your customer, you might wanna have some sort of coaching or live interaction in your program because the techniques that you find most helpful in therapy can be repackaged into a curriculum of your online income stream, so the skills and the way that you are reaching clients can translate to an online income stream. They're not only reserved for therapy.

The last way to make sure that your program is person-centered is to build on your strengths because the better that you show up for them, the more they're gonna get out of it. This is a silly example, but I have a real knack for metaphors and analogies, and I can take topics that are really complex or hard to define, and I can make them more digestible just in the way that I explain them.

Now, I used to use this skill all the time in session. All the time in session. Now I use it all the time in my online business. I use it here on the podcast. I use it on my Facebook Lives in our Empathy Rising Group, and I use it when I'm teaching my students.

It's likely that you have certain strengths that you bring to the therapy room that you can also weave into your online income stream, and you can use them to help your customers just as they might help your clients.

This might be your listening skills or your approachability that definitely make you a good therapist, but they can also make you a great coach or a great group program leader, or a great membership site.

It might be your extensive knowledge of a subject. Sometimes people just need to soak up information, and if you can give that to them in a program, you're absolutely helping them. That is still helpful.

It might be the years of experience in session, or it might be the fact that you've walked through something similar and you can't necessarily bring that similar experience into session.

You can bring it into your online income stream. Many of the strengths that we try hard to keep out of the therapy room shine in our online income streams because people want to know us and people want to learn from people, and people want to grow with other people.

It's definitely still coming from a place of service. It's definitely still helpful and it's still centered on the customer. The customer still gets everything that they need from your program. It's not designed to take from them. It's designed to give to them.

It is still really nice and plays nicely with our helper identity and our therapist identity. We do not have to lose everything that makes us a great therapist in order to move beyond the couch, or in order to bring out an online income stream.

If you focus on these things and some and many others, you can make sure that the work you do beyond the couch continues to better others, but it also betters yourself.

It betters their lives and it betters your life. I really hope that this episode was valuable and that you recognized how your attachment to the therapist identity might be setting you up for a little bit of martyrdom and might be keeping you from moving forward on some of your big dreams.

You can be goal-oriented and still show up for and help others. Your online offer can be both profitable and profound.

If you haven't subscribed yet, please do so, and as always, share the show with anyone you think needs to know that you can still be a helper, even if you're not sitting in session, okay? Until then, guys, keep on rising.

Thank you so much for listening to the Empathy Rising Podcast. For show notes, links, and downloads, head over to marissalawton.com/podcast where you'll be able to build a deeper relationship with me and the show, as well as binge on all past episodes.

If you loved what you heard today, it would be so kind of you to share it with your therapist friend, subscribe to the show and even leave a review. Can't wait to connect with you next week.