On Therapist Marketing

This essay is a response to Darragh Sheehan’s piece, The Therapist as the "Good-Enough Commodity": From Holding to Selling, published on Everyday Analysis. As someone with a deep (and perhaps alarming) interest in the marketing of psychotherapists and psychotherapy, I was really excited to see an actual thinkpiece on the topic, instead of the usual breathless regurgitation of Amy Porterfield maxims (love ya girl, but they can hit weird in Therapyland). I was even more excited to see it gaining traction in therapist Facebook groups, where the usual discourse on marketing tends toward despair.

Then I read it.

And now I’m frantically attempting to marshal my thoughts to respond as quickly as I can before this one perspective defines what “a thoughtful exploration of therapist marketing” looks like for too many therapists.

If you’re a therapist who hates marketing (or perhaps just feels uncomfy about it) and you’ve read Sheehan’s piece, I am begging you to give me some time here to defend marketing and share my vision of what marketing yourself as a therapist can be like.

There is an overwhelming stigma against “marketing” and “branding” in our field that stifles therapist self-expression AND competitiveness in the marketplace, strangling your chances of succeeding in capitalism. Everyone is influenced by this stigma, Sheehan’s essay endorses this stigma, and yet NO ONE is exempt from having to engage in the practice (including the author herself).

What we need is an approach to marketing/branding that is aligned with our personal and clinical values, facilitates client access to right-fit therapy services and clinicians, and ultimately makes each of us proud of who we are professionally. That’s what I offer.

But first, let’s talk about this article.

Disambiguating the Issues

It took me all day yesterday to read and (try to) process Sheehan’s dense and thought-provoking piece. Much of what bogged me down was my admittedly threadbare understanding of the psychoanalytic approach to therapy Sheehan embraces. This morning, I read some of her other writing I could find on the internet, including a piece published on Mad in America called From Public Service to Private Practice: The Collapse of the Social Work Profession. From what I think I understand, Sheehan is deeply concerned about how we define “psychotherapy” and its practice today. She has a deep reverence for the philosophy and the way of working to which she subscribes, and she seems to be articulating a warning about where it’s all going.

This “collapse of the social work profession” is, in Sheehan’s perspective, inextricably linked to how some therapists have chosen to respond to market forces. To me, this is conflating several issues I would like to pick apart:

1. What should therapy be, and what should therapists be like? What is therapy becoming, and are we ok with therapists “acting like that?”

2. What is “marketing,” and what is “branding,” exactly?

3. What is “good therapist marketing,” and what is “bad therapist marketing?”

We need to look at each of these issues separately.

What should therapy be?

What should it do, theoretically/philosophically?

I would need several years of study to understand exactly how Sheehan defines “the therapeutic task” and what a therapist should be endeavoring to do in the therapy room. I got my master’s in marriage and family therapy and we didn’t study psychoanalysis in any way whatsoever, so my rudimentary understanding of the author’s argument is that therapist relatability presented through marketing is fundamentally counter to the work of therapy. My colleague, Danni Biondini, who comes from the psychoanalytic world, shared this insight: “Lacanians believe that true therapeutic change happens through an encounter with the radical Otherness of the Other…[Sheehan posits that] this kind of identification with Sameness is, at best, a defensive illusion, and, at worst, a narcissistic pathology that undermines the very purpose of therapy.”

Ok. This is not the theory I gravitated toward in my clinical work (narrative/collaborative dialogic), so agree to disagree on that point. Personally, I tend to think therapy is and will always be, in the words of researcher Scott Miller, “a cultural activity…prone to shifts in popular discourse.” I’m a postmodernist at heart, and I think “therapy” will be what people want it to be. It’s going to change over time, unyoked to any eternal Truth about “how people heal.”

You, dear reader, have your own perspective on what “therapy” itself should be, philosophically. But it’s important to understand that the author’s foundational premise about what therapy should be underpins her critique of marketing/branding.

What kind of service should it be?

As for the job of “therapist” itself, in this Mad in America piece, Sheehan argues that “the social work profession should ideally be a public service with particular attention to serving the poor, yet…it has become not only a privatized service but also a clinical service for those of the privileged classes.”

Again…ok. It’s noble and wonderful to sacrifice yourself on the altar of altruism, but it’s a nobility I sadly lack. I want to maybe buy a house someday (hahahahhahaha). And when I surveyed this capitalist hellscape in which I found myself, I was looking for a less-bad way to make a living than my previous career (as a professional actor). Helping people with their emotional distress seemed like a nice option. And at no point in my admission to the field did any gatekeeper say, “you know you’re taking a vow of poverty, right?” So I think there are some differing opinions here.

You, of course, are entitled to your own opinions about what you think the career of “professional therapist” should or can look like. But Sheehan’s foundational premise is that therapy shouldn’t be a private service for those who can pay—if that’s where you’re coming from, I think I can see why you might have a problem with therapists responding to market influences.

What should therapists be like?

Finally, Sheehan demonstrates a belief that competence as a therapist results from the right kind of study, working in community mental health, and years of experience. She shames therapists who represent themselves publicly as better than they must be (according to her standards) by charging more than she thinks they should charge and describing themselves in their marketing in a way I assume is not sufficiently humble for Sheehan’s tastes.

(Fun fact: Did you know that our actual ethics codes used to specify that we weren’t allowed to engage in “self-aggrandizing” advertising practices like using bold-faced fonts in our telephone listings or listing more than one specialty? But then the Federal Trade Commission stepped in and said, and I paraphrase, “you can’t force humility in the interest of making all therapists sound the same because that’s the professional culture you want, that’s as bad as false or misleading advertising in that it withholds information critical for consumers to make an informed purchasing decision.” Learn more about the origins of these ethics code principles at my super-exciting webinar, Why Marketing Sucks for Therapists.)

On the point of how we determine clinical competence, I would refer you, dearest reader, to The Heart and Soul of Change, wherein Hubble et al. argue that the therapist variables that many in and outside of the field expect to influence clinical outcomes actually do not explain why some therapists get better client outcomes than other therapists (this goes for “age, gender, years of experience, professional discipline, degree, training, licensure, theoretical orientation, amount of supervision, personal therapy, specific or general competence, [and] use of evidence-based methods” [2010, p. 38]). They might make you feel better about yourself, and they might make you feel better about other therapists, but those things are professional shibboleths, not actual markers of competence.

But—obviously—you have your own beliefs about what makes a therapist worthy of, well, anything. And you will make your own judgments about when a therapist “deserves” to charge $200/hour or call themselves a “trauma specialist” on Instagram. But there is no objective standard against which we can all be measured.

All of this is to say, I have no counterpoint to the author’s claim that therapist marketing is ruining therapy. It all depends on your definition of therapy. What I value about therapy simply doesn’t align with what she values about therapy.

So now let’s get into marketing.

What is marketing, and what is branding?

“Marketing” is the act of bringing what you’re selling to the marketplace. It can be as obnoxious as a salesperson knocking on your door, it can be as innocuous as your name on a sign hanging on said door.

If you live in capitalism, the only way you avoid doing marketing is by being independently wealthy (and I could even make an argument…no Carrie just stay focused, this is long enough). If you need to exchange the service you offer for money to pay your rent, you WILL have to engage in marketing somehow. There is no other way to survive. You must let the market know what you’re selling.


So what is branding? A brand is the result of intentional choices made about how to present a seller and/or product to the marketplace. Some argue “everyone has a brand whether you like it or not,” but I have seen in the literature the counterpoint that no, everyone has a REPUTATION, but a BRAND requires some level of conscious strategy. I tend to align with that definition.

So a brand is a story about the seller and what is being sold.

What this author seems to be reacting to most negatively is “personal branding.”

Personal branding is the act of taking the branding principles typically applied to products under goods-dominant logic (I can explain later if you care) and applying those principles to people.

Chief among these principles is “differentiation”—in a crowded marketplace, branding serves to make the product stand out so consumers will choose that particular product over the competitors that are not discernibly different in meaningful ways.

As applied to people, this includes the construction of a personal brand that largely attempts to achieve “uniqueness,” “friendliness,” and “realness.” These are identity claims the personal brand makes to convince the consumer to choose their brand over another brand.

You don’t have to do it that way. There are lots of ways to do marketing and branding.

Lots.

So many.

If you think that “marketing” perforce equals “niching down to your Ideal Client,” you have been marketed to by a marketing marketer. That is one specific approach (a niche or concentrated strategy), but there are others.

Again, I’ll reiterate - marketing is letting people know you’re selling something. Branding is the sum of the strategic choices you make to represent that thing in the marketplace.

So what is the place of marketing and branding in Therapyland?

What is “good” therapist marketing, and what is “bad” therapist marketing?

Sheehan herself knows one must market oneself as a therapist. She has a website for her clinical practice, various directory profiles including Psychology Today, and a website for her online project, the Center for Critical and Clinical Analysis (there may be more but I stopped there).

So I believe Sheehan takes umbrage not with marketing itself per se but with certain marketing strategies and certain approaches to branding (possibly the whole idea of branding itself).

Throughout the course of the article, she offers examples of therapist-marketing-gone-wrong. She describes “concerning disclosures of personal experiences, identities, lifestyles, trauma histories, political views, hobbies, and increasingly, therapist’s own psychiatric diagnoses as well as selfies.” She highlights the “young, attractive, and sometimes ‘hipster’ therapists” she’s noticed populating group practices, noting that one group practice owner “admitted that it was intentional on their part to hire attractive therapists because it helped them gain more patient referrals.” And she dedicates two paragraphs to richer descriptions of specific therapists that dismay her, including “an Upper East Side 'girl power' lifestyle influencer” therapist and “a well-known Instagram influencer/mental health professional and ‘healer’…wearing feathers and using social media filters, speaking in a slow, performative ‘spiritual voice.’”

Through her examples, we can begin to see what she identifies as “good marketing” and what she identifies as “bad:”

• Self-disclosures of various kinds are bad.

• Selfies are bad.

• Consciously and/or strategically using physical attractiveness is bad.

• An “Upper East Side 'girl power' lifestyle influencer” vibe is bad.

• Affiliate marketing (links to purchase featured products) is bad.

• The description “relationally focused therapy” is bad (because, Sheehan argues, that therapist is not using the term correctly).

• “Affirming…an upper-class wellness lifestyle and aspirational notions of health linked to consumerism” is bad.

• Describing yourself as a “healer…wearing feathers and using social media filters, speaking in a slow, performative ‘spiritual voice’, [offering] vague, ‘decolonial’ rhetoric dressed up as ‘pre-colonial spiritual wisdom’” is bad.

• Being a salesperson is bad.

• Probably using social media is bad.

You may or may not agree with some or all of the above points. My hope is that you see how there are multiple, specific issues embodied in these examples that MUST be disentangled rather than simply scoffing and announcing MARKETING BAD AND PEOPLE WHO DO IT SUCK. We need to have a productive discussion about what therapy marketing is “good,” what is “bad,” and why.

Are self-disclosures all bad? If not, which ones are ok—and why?

Is using physical attractiveness bad? If you are physically attractive, should you hide it? Why?

Is presenting yourself as an “Upper East Side 'girl power' lifestyle influencer” really so much worse than as a “neo-Reichian somatically oriented psychodynamic psychotherapist” cloaked in mystery and speaking in a Lacanian tongue? Why???

Now. What Sheehan really seems to have a problem with is what she calls “identity-based branding.” She explains:

As psychotherapy becomes increasingly commodified and sought after on online markets, a form of professional splitting emerges between the therapists who engage in identity-based branding and those who do not. Meaning when a therapist brands themself as a professional who "gets it" (by using their identity), they explicitly or implicitly suggest that other therapists (often without that identity or lifestyle, etc.) don’t.

Sheehan goes to great lengths to explain why she is philosophically opposed to a therapist presenting themselves in a way that emphasizes “sameness.” As we discussed earlier, this has to do with what she fundamentally believes therapy is.

If you theoretically align with Sheehan, then you likely agree. Maybe that is a problem? I wouldn’t know, since it’s not my theoretical home, I don’t ascribe to the same philosophy, and I don’t think the work of therapy hinges on the therapist embodying the Other.

But the truth is, I think she presents a false dichotomy.

There are no therapists that don’t engage in what she calls “identity-based branding.” It’s simply to what extent one does it and how.

Let me explain.

By representing yourself as a therapist in the marketplace, you are using your identity.

By taking the mantle of “therapist,” and appearing in the world however you are experienced, you are being interpreted based on consumers’ meaning-making around those signifiers (what a consumer thinks is meant by “therapist,” what conclusions they draw from signals unique to you that you’re throwing off, etc.).

If you look a certain way and you call yourself a certain title, and those signals are culturally relevant in the area in which you are attempting to solicit clients, it literally might be enough to fill out a PsychologyToday profile and wait for the appointments to roll in.

But you’re not NOT engaging in identity-based branding! You’re just lucky that your identity aligns with what you’re trying to sell! And you’re lucky that people want to buy what you’re selling!

Now, a social worker in Bakersfield, CA is faced with an entirely different meaning-making environment, than, say, a social worker in Manhattan. For these therapists, relying on the cultural relevance of “Licensed Clinical Social Worker” alone may be self-destructive in two directions: to the therapist’s business prospects, and to the potential clients they COULD help but who may well have a negative reaction to the meaning signified by “social worker” stemming from institutional trauma.

This is where more elaborate “identity-based branding” becomes certainly useful, arguably an active good. As my colleague, Adriana Rodriguez, put it, “many therapists—BIPOC, queer, immigrant, disabled, neurodivergent, and first-gen folx, for example—use branding as a bridge to a world that wasn’t made for us as therapists but also not made for our clients."

Sheehan acknowledges therapists like Adriana are “often consciously guided by good intentions and the desire to create safer therapeutic spaces for marginalized communities that have historically been excluded, misattuned to, or even harmed by the field.” However, in the next clause of the sentence, she asserts that, “many of the more overtly affirming and identity-centered approaches to therapy, fueled by the logic of online branding and marketability, appear to be overcorrections of these problems.”

The “overcorrection” she’s naming is responsiveness to market pressures. And she sees the influence of the market on Therapyland as an existential threat:

The 'influencer' approach to therapy is symptomatic of a broader shift. In particular, as private practices adopt business-like models, there's a risk that private therapists and group practices might prioritize marketable attributes, such as age, appearance, style, aesthetics, and/or niche identities, political beliefs etc., to attract and engage patients, over a commitment to therapeutic skill, experience, clinical theory, and, in the end, a psychotherapeutic process. Said differently, therapeutic authority in popular culture is increasingly being linked to marketable attributes along with empty rhetoric, more than a clinician’s actual years of clinical experience or training; undoubtedly carrying the potential to significantly transform the field.

I just want to make sure we’re clear on what she’s saying above. She is sounding the alarm because she wants consumers to want “therapeutic skill, experience, clinical theory, and…a psychotherapeutic process” so that the market bestows career success on those clinicians who are “entitled” to it—those with the requisite-but-unspecified amount of clinical expertise and training.

But consumers don’t seem to want that. Instead, Sheehan believes they seem to want “marketable attributes along with empty rhetoric.”

Unsurprisingly, Sheehan is not optimistic about how the field may be transformed.

I am.

An Alternative Approach

My own theoretical perspective on therapy, as I’ve mentioned, comes from a more narrative/collaborative dialogic position.

I believe we should care what clients want from therapy. A lot.

Yeah, I think we as a field have come up with some good ideas we can share with our clients, but I also think they don’t amount to a hill of beans if clients don’t find them helpful.

I did nearly 150 episodes of a podcast dedicated to centering clients’ experiences of therapy in an attempt to learn—from them—what was helpful, what wasn’t, and how we could get better as a field.

So while I really hate capitalism, I have an appreciation for the market imperative in that it represents consumers voting with their dollars.

I also believe therapy is an act of “value co-creation.” This comes from service-dominant logic; I will spare you further explanation there because I do not want to overstay my welcome, but this framework is foundational to my own philosophy of therapist marketing. When I say “value co-creation,” I mean that I don’t think therapy fucking exists without both a therapist and a client interacting, contributing to the service, and finding it valuable.

So I actually think it’s important theoretically and clinically that what we call “therapy” is appealing to clients.

Fortunately, my perspective also makes it easier to survive capitalism as a professional therapist, because it’s aligned with the market imperative.

The market wants therapists to create a product consumers want to buy.

If you share my perspective that therapy is something to be co-created with clients rather than forced down their throats from your position of Knowing Best, you’re in luck—you are not working at cross-purposes to your own financial stability!

So collaboration with clients on the service offer of “therapy” can be a good.

Now…how do we do marketing “right?”

What should marketing do?

There are lots of competing masters we must serve as therapists engaging in marketing and branding.

On the one hand, we have to do it “within bounds” vis à vis the field of psychotherapy. We need to work within our legal and ethical obligations as defined by our license, our professional organization membership, and whatever other standards to which we choose to adhere.

On the other hand, we have to do it in a way that works. We need to “fit in” to how consumers encounter, evaluate, and select professional services. We must meet them where they are, so to speak.

On the THIRD hand…we have to do it in a way that works for each of us uniquely. We all have different risk and protective factors that influences how we approach marketing.

You might be struggling against internalized messages that you’re never good enough.

You might be intimidated by technology, unsure where to start with an “online presence.”

You might be overwhelmed by the tumultuous voices of marketing gurus screaming, “YOU MUST DO IT THIS WAY, WHY AREN’T YOU DOING IT THIS WAY.”

And, even if you’re able to overcome all of that and get to the marketplace, you might not know what exactly to say about yourself once you get there.

All of that is to say—it’s hard. Figuring out how to market and brand yourself as a therapist is really fucking hard. It is so so so so SO not as simple as “niching down to your Ideal Client.”

I would like to focus on three things I think therapist marketing should do:

1. Be appropriately unusual.

2. Inspire “approach” behavior in right-fit clients AND “avoid” behavior in wrong-fit clients.

3. Enhance your clients’ predictive capacity.

Allow me to address each in turn.

Be appropriately unusual.

I am borrowing this phrase from Tom Andersen, the Norwegian psychiatrist who developed the Reflecting Team.

In therapy, appropriately unusual comments “find the right balance of speaking from within clients’ worldviews while simultaneously introducing novel perspectives that allow clients to reconsider, rethink, and reimagine problems and possibilities” (Gehart, 2018, p. 388). Comments that are too usual, that just reflect things clients already know, don’t really help. Comments that are too unusual are too distant from their lived experience or worldview, they don’t resonate or land, they get dismissed and don’t move the client toward change. This is the same with consumers.

For potential therapy clients, you need to “fit in” to what they feel is “appropriate” for a therapist (which is highly idiosyncratic, by the way, another lecture for another time). But, you also need to “stand out”—you need to be differentiated so that consumers will pick you out of the marketplace instead of someone else. Your “brand” (how you present yourself as a professional in the marketplace) has to be “in bounds” enough for someone they would turn to for help, has to be within the realm of their expectations, but you also have to be offering something different enough from what they’ve already tried so that they see how interacting with you, engaging your service, might offer them new possibilities that don’t exist without you.

Appropriately unusual.

If you are doing this right, you will NOT be liked by everyone. Brands that are appropriate to EVERYONE blend in. But brands that are ONLY unusual are turn-offs. The key is do both things at the same time, which brings me to second thing your marketing should do…

Inspire “approach” behavior in right-fit clients and “avoid” behavior in wrong-fit clients.

Marketing advice always focuses on the first part of that sentence, but I think it is critically important to do both things in equal measure.

Unless you’re a mental health tech giant, your resources are limited. For the business health of your practice, it’s not wise to be spending resources attracting clients who will not sign up after the consult call or who won’t return after an intake. But more critically, it’s CLINICALLY important that you inspire “avoid” behavior in wrong-fit clients.

Research on client preferences is showing that clinical outcomes improve when clients’ strong preferences for therapy are accommodated. Unfortunately, many clients don’t really know their preferences for therapy until they see or experience it—your marketing efforts are a great way to help them identify those strong preferences ahead of time and optimize their chances for a better clinical outcome.

Perhaps even more important is preserving consumer confidence in therapy as a whole. Imagine a client that has been on the fence about therapy. They see a TikTok about IFS and decide, “hey, that might actually work for me!” They don’t know any better, so they assume IFS = therapy, and make an appointment with a therapist. But what if that therapist practices solution-focused brief therapy? The client might not realize this is simply a different approach. They might think, “I ended up with a pretty bad therapist, we haven’t talked at all about my Manager part.” Or worse, they might think, “oh therapy sucks. I’ll just watch TikToks.” Even worse? They might bad-mouth the SFBT therapist online or to their network.

Clients who aren’t a good fit for you should never make it past your website, or PsychToday profile, or whatever other brand architecture you’ve got out in the world. Let’s not waste their time and resources—or your own. To do this, to inspire approach behavior in right-fit clients and avoid behavior in wrong-fit clients, we need to do the third thing marketing should do…

Enhance your potential clients’ predictive capacity.

Consumers who purchase services like therapy experience a lot of anxiety because of the intangible nature of what we’re selling. They lack “predictive capacity”—it’s very hard to predict whether the purchase will be worth the money until after it’s over. This is really different from, say, buying a shirt. You can go try on the shirt, and this helps you predict whether you’re going to be satisfied with your purchase. Even once you make the purchase, if you end up dissatisfied, you can often return the shirt and get your money back. The stakes are nowhere near as high as purchasing a therapy appointment. This gives clients a ton of anxiety about the purchase, and they seek to alleviate their anxiety by gathering as much data as they can to inform their predictions about what therapy with you will be like.

We need to be helping potential clients develop the best possible prediction about what therapy with you will be like, to make it easier to decide it’s worth the investment. So they can self-select according to their preferences for therapy and also have realistic expectations set. But to do that, we need to know what we’re selling, then paint a rich picture of that experience in our marketing.

And that’s why it all starts with an Interpersonal Brand.

The Interpersonal Brand

The Interpersonal Brand is one that is meaningful and authentic to you (so it’s sustainable) but is ALSO useful to your clients.

It co-creates value bidirectionally.

What does it need to do for your clients?

Your marketing and branding needs to kick-off all the buy-in and rapport-building work we were taught starts in the intake. In almost every instance, your client has formed some impression of you before arriving for the intake—even if they’ve never encountered your marketing, if they were referred by someone, they’re forming an impression based on their relationship with the referrer. A story has already begun to be told about what “therapy” with you is, and who you are as a “therapist.” That story (your Interpersonal Brand) is the inception of the therapeutic relationship, and it’s an opportunity to leverage client expectations and client preferences for treatment to optimize treatment. This influence should continue even after they become a client—after all, your office is branded, the manner in which you communicate in-between sessions is branded, the way you handle rescheduling or no-shows is branded…you get it. All of the ways in which you represent your service to your clients (I call it your Service Presentation) should be cohesive to support the overall experience of “therapy.”

What about for you? What should your Interpersonal Brand do for you?

This is where I get real controversial. Take one last ride with me.

I believe marketing is a relational self-making activity.

WTF Carrie?

I warned you. Hang on.

I take a social constructionist view of identity. It’s all fine and good to “find yourself” on an individualistic mountaintop somewhere, but eventually you have to come back down and be in the world.

I like the idea that we are all working on our “Project of the Self” (the ideal person we’d like to be in the world), and our various efforts in life are hopefully aligned with getting us closer to that Self (when they are not, things like imposter syndrome and burnout result). And if you subscribe to symbolic self-completion theory as I do, you’ll agree that we collect “symbols” of our progress toward that Self, kinda like Girl Scout badges. Want to be an educated person? Get a degree. Want to be a good person? Do what you think goodness entails, maybe donating to a cause you believe in.

The thing is that we also define ourselves relationally. We need others to know what kind of person we are, and agree that we are the person we think are. So it’s helpful if these symbols we acquire are mutually agreed-upon. We mostly all agree that a degree means you got educated, but if someone thinks your university is trash, they might think less of your so-called education. So we seek to accrue symbols that are meaningful to us and also meaningful to others.

(Side note: Sheehan might describe this as the “branded self,” but whereas she perceives this Self to be empty and soulless, I see it as an actualizing soul seeking to be known.)

In the world we currently live in, capitalism (neoliberalism, apparently) requires us to “commodify our Selves.” We have to use who we are TO OTHER PEOPLE in order to make a living. We sell our “selves.”

This has resulted in a requirement (again, to survive economically) that we cultivate a marketable Self. And this is exacerbated by something called “context collapse.”

Context collapse refers to the phenomenon facilitated by the internet wherein all of our performances of our Selfhood have the potential to be witnessed by anyone we know. We used to be able to be a different person (to an extent) at work, at home with family, out with friends… but now, all of those contexts have COLLAPSED. Everyone can see the same performances of Self. This has resulted in the reality that we functionally are left with ONE public identity.

Context collapse can be problematic because of “expectancy violations.” This is what happens when someone expects you to be a certain way, but then they witness you performing in a way that is not aligned with that expectation - their expectation has been violated. And expectancy violations are experienced as a betrayal, as a breach of trust.

This becomes EXTREMELY problematic as we need to make a living, where purchases are based in trust. Particularly for service providers like therapists, where what you’re selling is “you” (not the real-authentic-private version of you that your family knows, but the you that clients form a relationship with). Your public identity is also the core of your professional service offer.

So.

You get one public professional identity, because you don’t want to cause expectancy violations in your clients.

And this one public professional identity is (arguably) an incredibly meaningful part of your “Project of the Self.”

This is the tension Interpersonal Branding was built to hold.

Interpersonal Branding should (as all marketing should) improve the state of your business.

But it should also make you feel proud. It should be fulfilling. It should get you a little bit closer to the You you want to be in the world.

That is the alternative I offer.

You don’t need to dance on TikTok, you don’t need to “💖 HEY GIRL!! 🤩” your way through Instagram, you don’t need to hurl business cards into the void.

You CAN! If that fills you up! Whether or not that represents the downfall of psychotherapy writ large is beyond my purview (and frankly, my interest).

What I’m most concerned about is helping you become the professional you want to be in the world so you can help the people you became a therapist to help.

Not long after I finished my thesis and graduated from my master’s program, I burst into tears on a cross-country road trip with my partner. We had been discussing what it would look like to turn my work with Interpersonal Branding into a way to make a living for myself, and it occurred to me that Interpersonal Branding really, at its core, is about helping people survive capitalism—and wouldn’t that just perpetuate capitalism? And should I maybe be bending my efforts toward dismantling capitalism itself??

My dear, sweet, empathic-yet-realistic partner reached over, held my hand, and said, “Carrie, how much is rent and when is it due?”

I wailed harder, and in that moment, I decided to leave dismantling capitalism to others and find a way to do good-enough work that served others and made me happy.

If you’d like to do the same, I hope that you do.