Is the neighborhood safe for all genders, sexualities, ages, body sizes and ethnicities? I’m just listing questions that counselors should ask themselves if they want a truly accessible practice.Īre you educated about how people are limited in accessibility to therapy services? Keep in mind that I’m not saying you, or I, should be able to tick everything off this list. So here’s a list I came up that would make any therapist’s practice a lot more accessible. But honestly the search results are all over the place. But before I can figure out what my answer is, I probably need to parse out what an accessible therapy practice actually is… And of course if you’re a therapist, you’ll have your own answer that will make perfect sense to you.
#Private practice im fine free
While I don’t have the definitive answer, (feel free to scour the inevitable Facebook comments when I post this blog if you want to find therapists who claim to have the answer) I can at least answer this myself. How accessible should my therapy practice be?
I also appreciate the feedback from therapists asking me to grow, but in this case? I choose not to and I think that’s just fine. But I am very excited for thousands of other therapists that will continue to provide telehealth services, and I will happily direct clients to those therapists if that’s what they need. Sorry Facebook therapists! I hate providing online therapy. So, am I going to grow and become more accessible by providing online therapy post-pandemic? I wanted to keep going back and forth with them but really, I needed to just log off of Facebook instead.
Eventually I took a little time to think about it, and then I sorta came around to the criticism. I was defensive, surprised and felt like the therapists giving the feedback were unfairly attacking me. I took it like a white privileged cis man who’s continually doing the work. I’d like to say I took the feedback like a champ but I didn’t. They basically said that I should think about becoming less uncomfortable with telehealth so that my practice can be more accessible.
But along with the positive comments I also got some criticism from therapists about how not providing online therapy will make my practice less accessible to folks in rural communities who don’t have many options for counselors in their area and for people who aren’t physically able to travel to my office.
Sorry clients!Īs one does, I posted it on Facebook, and as expected, I got a lot of likes and comments from other therapists that feel my pain. Some of my clients might dig it, but in this case, I’m unabashedly putting my needs before my clients needs once we can all safely get back into the office. I also leaned heavily into my biggest gripe of pandemic counseling which is that I can’t wait until I never have to provide online counseling again. I was going for relatability and I think I nailed it. Make it stop!” All COVID classics, if you ask me. It had the standard “It’s hard to counsel clients who are going through the same thing I am!” to the “I can’t stop looking at the video of myself on Zoom. A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog post––a funny blog post, if you ask me––about the hard lessons I’ve learned as a therapist during the pandemic.
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