3 Toxic Messages New Therapists Hear All the Time

The process of becoming a therapist is difficult. It’s long and expensive. It often involves working with high-need clients while also dealing with one’s own personal and financial stresses. Experienced therapists recognize this, and often go out of their way to encourage new professionals.

Breaking Down 3 Toxic Messages

However, some of the well-meaning messages that experienced therapists (like me) send to new therapists can come across as out of touch, or even damaging—precisely the opposite of the intended impact. Here are three such messages. I often observe these in therapist communities, and I’ve been guilty of sending these toxic messages myself on more than a few occasions. 

1. “Charge what you’re worth.” 

Your value as a person, or as a therapist, isn’t your paycheck. (If it were, every public school teacher should immediately quit and do something that pays better.) Experienced therapists sometimes say this to newer therapists to encourage them to raise their rates, in hopes that it will ease the path to financial stability for those new clinicians. But this message can cause damage on two fronts. 

First, this tells clinicians who have set lower fees with intentionality—perhaps to build a caseload, or to serve a lower-income population—that they have less worth as professionals. It suggests that working with richer people, which you will inevitably do if you drop insurance panels and raise your cash fee, is somehow more valuable or more important work. For a new therapist who buys into this message, it sets them up to resent clients who the therapist serves at lower fees, and to fruitlessly chase validation and reassurance of their goodness in monetary form. Your bank account balance is not, and will never be, your measure of worth as a human being or a clinician.

Second, it’s rather transparently self-serving to tell new therapists, “Charge something closer to what I charge.” At best, it comes off as out of touch, and the new therapist’s internal response will be along the lines of “I don’t need you to tell me how to run my business, thanks.” At worst, “Charge what you’re worth” comes off as thinly-veiled criticism, a sort of “How dare you compete with me on price.” 

2. “Self-care prevents burnout.” 

Long past the pain of becoming a therapist, it can still be difficult to be a therapist. You’re working with clients in their darkest and most chaotic moments. To be able to serve clients well through a decades-long career, you need to take care of yourself. In other words, self-care is a real thing that you should do. But much of what we experience as burnout would never be fixed by any amount of self-care. If you’re working in a broken system, getting a latte or taking a few days off will not fix that system. 

Focusing on self-care rather than advocacy leads therapists—and their supervisors and employers—to mislocate many of the reasons why therapists quit. It takes systemic failures and makes them the fault of the clinicians doing their best to serve clients within that failed system.

3. “Just do what you love.” 

Wouldn’t it be great if you woke up one morning, saw the sunshine, and had an epiphany about what you wanted to do with your life? Even better, wouldn’t it be great if you could immediately set off full-time to do that thing, getting gradually better at it along the way? It’s a lovely image, but that just isn’t how it works for most people, especially early in their careers. 

Whether it’s choosing a career in general, or choosing a specific audience or niche as a therapist, most of us have to do a lot of what we don’t love in order to figure out what we do love. We have false starts, we make mistakes. We take some jobs just to be able to pay rent, and others that we quickly learn to regret. 

There are a lot of very good and understandable reasons why new therapists can’t “just do what they love.” They need to get licensed, put food on the table, care for their families. They need to serve their community and have chosen to be responsive to the community’s needs rather than elevating their own comfort. They haven’t discovered what they love yet, or what they love has evolved. Telling a new therapist to “Just do what you love” is naive at best, patronizing at worst. “See if you can at least make what you love a little bit of a side hustle while you keep doing what you have to do” is probably more on point.

Moving From Intention to Impact

As I mentioned, I believe all of these messages are sent with good intentions. Experienced therapists want to encourage new clinicians to make their way out of financial hardship, to endure the inevitable difficult moments as a professional, and to not just survive but truly thrive in the career we share. Indeed, some new clinicians do find these messages encouraging in the ways that match those intentions. So my own aim here isn’t to criticize. Rather, it’s to bring forth a discussion of the range of impacts these messages can have. As you can see, they’re not as broadly helpful as we might hope.

One of my hobbies is running. I’m not especially fast, especially now in my forties, but I’ve always enjoyed it. When I run a marathon, there’s almost always someone at about mile five, cheering on the runners and saying “You’re almost there.” That someone usually means well, but they’re obviously not a runner themselves. If they were, they would know that at mile five, we’re not even close to “almost there.” So the message backfires, and leaves a lot of the runners that person meant to encourage thinking instead about how far they still have to go. 

We can do better for our new colleagues than “you’re almost there.” We want to genuinely encourage and support. For my part in putting forward the messages above—colleagues, I’m sorry. If I had it to do over again, I’d say, Be thoughtful about what you charge, it should line up with your intentions and goals. Self-care is great, and working to change—or, when needed, get out of—a broken system is great too. Try to use what you have to do as a way of figuring out what you love to do.

Are those messages less optimistic? Perhaps. But my hope is that they keep the encouragement while better recognizing the person on the receiving end. If I genuinely want you to succeed as my new colleague—and I do—then I owe you messages that show that I understand the struggle, and believe in your ability to make it through.