The Place I Couldn't Find
I have been a therapist for more than twenty years.
Long enough to remember when fax machines were the only reasonable way to exchange clinical information. Long enough to have worked inside a lot of different systems, under a lot of different kinds of leadership, alongside some extraordinary clinicians, and long enough to know that I still have a hell of a lot to learn.
Also long enough to realize that there was something about the way we were doing this work that I could no longer pretend was acceptable.
The Place I Kept Looking For
For years, I kept looking for a professional home that felt the way I thought this work deserved to feel. I wanted a place where people cared deeply about becoming excellent clinicians without needing to posture like they already knew everything. Where it was safe to walk into somebody's office and say, "I have no idea what I'm doing with this case. Can I run this by you?" without wondering whether admitting uncertainty had somehow made you less competent.
I wanted consultation that felt like people brainstorming and collaborating together instead of performing expertise at each other. I wanted leadership that understood that therapists are human beings, not infinitely renewable resources. I wanted a place where curiosity mattered more than certainty, generosity mattered more than competition, and asking for help was understood as wisdom instead of weakness. For a very long time, I assumed that surely this place existed somewhere - I just hadn't found it yet.
I worked in systems that talked about compassion while demanding productivity, places that said they valued collaboration while quietly rewarding competition, and environments where extraordinary emotional labor was treated as simply part of the job. Therapists were expected to somehow absorb the impact of the work without letting it interfere with their performance, as though the quality of what they offered could be separated from the conditions under which they were expected to offer it, and certainly not how many sessions they could handle in a week.
Burnout As Standard Practice
We are so good at doing this in our profession; talking about boundaries, about self-care.
We teach our clients about nervous systems and burnout and the cost of chronic stress while continuing to build workplaces where therapists are overextended, under-supported, emotionally depleted, and expected to keep showing up as if none of that changes the person sitting in the therapist's chair. When clinicians struggle, we praise their resilience; tell them to take care of themselves. And then, very often, we send them right back into the same conditions that depleted them in the first place.
At some point, I stopped being willing to accept that as normal.
The pandemic made some of this impossible to ignore. Therapists were suddenly holding an extraordinary amount of fear, grief, isolation, conflict, uncertainty, and loss for other people while living through those exact same things themselves. We were not outside the experience helping everyone else through it; we were in it too.
Many of us were sitting alone in rooms all day, staring into screens, absorbing story after story while trying to hold together our own families, relationships, health, finances, and sanity. We were expected to keep functioning because people needed us, and they did need us, but we needed people too.
And Then It Hit Me...
For me, the pandemic exposed something that had probably been bothering me for a long time: being surrounded by people professionally is not the same thing as being supported by them.
You can work inside a clinic full of therapists and still feel completely alone.
You can attend meetings every week and still not feel known.
You can have supervisors, coworkers, leadership teams, policies, committees, and organizational charts and still have no place to say, "This is hard and I don't know what to do."
Eventually I had a thought that was both incredibly simple and strangely devastating: If I'm going to feel alone, I'd rather actually be alone—because at least that would make sense.
Independence Wasn't The Same As Belonging
That realization was part of what pushed me more fully toward solo practice.
And there is a lot that I love about solo practice.
I love being able to make clinical decisions based on what I believe is right for the person sitting across from me without having to consider politics or optics. I love building a practice that actually reflects who I am and what I stand for.
I love autonomy, but what I did not love was discovering how easily autonomy can turn into isolation. Private practice can become a series of little islands where we sit in separate offices, build separate websites, worry about separate caseloads, solve separate problems, and accumulate our own separate piles of information. We refer to one another, we consult when something gets complicated, we meet for coffee and swear we should do this more often, and then everyone goes back to their island.
I started wondering why we had accepted the idea that independence and community were somehow opposites, or that becoming autonomous had to mean becoming disconnected. Why did therapists have to choose between working inside systems that did not fit them and building practices where they had to carry everything alone?
I also started paying more attention to how much of our profession seems organized around scarcity—scarcity of referrals, clients, knowledge, opportunities, recognition—as though another therapist becoming extraordinary somehow threatens my ability to become extraordinary too.
It Doesn't Have To Be This Way
Another clinician knowing something I don't know gives me an opportunity to learn something. Another therapist building a successful practice does not diminish mine, and another person receiving a referral does not take something away from me. Someone else's brilliance does not have to become evidence of my inadequacy.
In fact, I have come to believe almost the opposite. When therapists stop guarding what they know and start sharing it, everybody gets better. When someone can say, "I tried this and it worked," or, "I completely screwed this up and here's what I learned," that knowledge becomes useful beyond just one person. When clinicians can challenge each other without humiliating each other, we grow, and when we trust one another enough to admit uncertainty, we become safer practitioners.
There is also something different about being in a community where someone's success can simply be good news, not a quiet invitation to compare ourselves to them. Where we can be generous with referrals, resources, encouragement, expertise, and opportunity because we are not constantly operating from the assumption that there will never be enough.
When therapists have people around them who notice that they are struggling before overwhelm becomes burnout and before depletion becomes collapse, the work becomes more sustainable.
Not easy - Sustainable. There is a difference.
This profession was never going to be easy. We sit with grief and terror and shame and rage and betrayal and the complicated, breathtaking mess of being human. We witness things most people will never hear about, and we hold stories that cannot be casually unpacked over dinner when we get home at the end of the day.
That work changes us, and I think we need to be honest about that. Healing is not a one-directional transaction where the therapist somehow remains untouched while helping another person transform. We are affected by the work because we are human enough to be affected by it, and that is not a professional defect. It is part of what makes the work possible.
If we are going to ask therapists to keep showing up with that kind of presence, depth, skill, and humanity, then I think our profession has an obligation to care about the conditions surrounding them.
Therapists deserve to be cared for with the same intentionality they offer the people who walk through their doors, and that belief has become impossible for me to separate from clinical excellence.
I want extraordinary therapists. I want therapists who keep learning long after they have accumulated enough credentials to stop, clinicians willing to examine their blind spots, challenge their assumptions, expose what they do not know, receive feedback, and change when change is needed. I want people who take this profession seriously enough to refuse complacency.
But I no longer believe excellence requires martyrdom.
A therapist should not have to destroy their financial stability to prove they care, sacrifice their family to prove they are committed, work until their nervous system revolts, or become emotionally numb just to survive the profession they once loved.
And they should not have to do extraordinary work alone.
Somewhere along the way, the question I had been asking began to change. I stopped asking, Where is the place I am looking for? and started asking, What am I willing to build instead?
That question scared me a little, because once you ask it honestly, you lose the luxury of only complaining about what already exists. At some point you have to decide whether you are willing to take responsibility for creating something different. The Collective Healing Rebellion began there.
And So It Began...
Not as a business plan or a membership package, and not as a clever name attached to office space. It began as a refusal to accept that isolation is simply the price therapists pay for independence, and with the belief that clinicians can retain their autonomy while still belonging somewhere.
It grew from the possibility that we can build practices that are ethical, sustainable, deeply personal, and financially viable without treating every other therapist as competition; that expertise can exist without hierarchy determining human worth; that vulnerability can coexist with excellence; and that feedback does not have to threaten belonging.
I believe we can disagree, challenge one another, question systems, admit mistakes, celebrate wins, share what we know, and remain connected through all of it.
I am not interested in creating another professional organization where people pay dues, collect benefits, attend the occasional event, and otherwise remain strangers. I am interested in what happens when independent therapists actually become invested in one another. What happens when someone's difficult case does not have to remain their private burden, when someone's new idea gets the benefit of ten thoughtful minds instead of one exhausted one, and when the therapist who is struggling does not have to wait until they are falling apart before somebody notices?
What happens when the therapist who is thriving does not have to make themselves smaller so nobody else feels uncomfortable, and when we stop behaving as though knowledge has to be hoarded instead of treating it as something that becomes more valuable when it moves between people? I want to know what becomes possible when we build professional community around the actual humans doing this work.
The Future
I don't know exactly what The Collective Healing Rebellion will become yet, and that is intentional. Right now, it is in incubation, which means we are building the culture before we build the machinery around it. We are asking what therapists actually need instead of deciding we already know, and we are developing the relationships, values, resources, expectations, and structures slowly enough to notice what is real and what only sounded good on paper.
Some ideas will work and some won't. People will surprise us, and I will almost certainly change my mind about things along the way. I want to build something capable of learning.
What I do know is that I have spent enough of my career looking for this place, and I am ready to help create it: a place where extraordinary clinical work and being fully human are not competing expectations, where independence does not require isolation, and where asking for help can be ordinary instead of embarrassing.
I want a community where success can be shared rather than guarded, where curiosity and honesty matter, and where therapists are allowed to question what they have been told they are supposed to accept. When something in our profession is not working, I want us to have enough courage to say so, enough imagination to picture something better, and enough commitment to try building it together.
After more than twenty years of doing this work, I have become convinced that the therapists who spend their lives helping other people heal deserve places where they can be held, challenged, encouraged, known, and changed too.
I couldn't find that place.
So I'm building it.
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