Therapy is profoundly weird. It forces us into a messy middle ground—a hybrid existence that few outside the profession understand. As Matt Hussey shared, the more "unprofessional" we were in discussing these realities, the more it resonated.

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The Financial & Emotional Contradiction

We're trapped in a constant battle between our identity as a healer and our role as a business owner:

The Worth Gap: We are socialized in training to provide free or low-cost service, creating therapists who are "terrible at following" the healthy boundaries we preach. This leads to profound financial anxiety. As Matt put it, "You can be a really good business person, but a terrible therapist... some of the best therapists I've ever met can barely ask to charge money for their work."

The Business Trap: We spend Herculean effort achieving licensure only to be dumped into "the great nothing" (Matt Hussey)—where we must fend for ourselves, performing all administrative, marketing, and accounting tasks while simultaneously holding immense emotional space. The math often "is not math-ing," leading to total burnout.

The Double Life and Clinical Grief 🎭

The job requires us to exist in two versions of ourselves, creating an isolation that is unique to our field:

The Asymmetry: We have so much emotional depth with clients, yet we are "not known though to them deeply and we can't be." This necessary emotional containment means that when clients leave or pass away, we experience clinical grief in a way that is "unnatural" and not socially prescribed.

Borrowing Tools: Our skills become a coping mechanism. We can find ourselves "slipping into that role" in personal life, using our therapeutic tools "to cover for shyness or some sort of like social awkwardness" (Matt Hussey), which can feel "isolating and othering" to those closest to us.

Emotional Numbing: The demand to suppress our own physical symptoms of fatigue—an interoception failure—means we give until we are "literally on fire." This often results in a protective emotional numbing, reducing our range of feeling because we're scared to "drop into therapist mode and help them get out of whatever they're in" in our off-hours.

This work is difficult, nuanced, and requires deep courage to acknowledge the messy contradictions that define our role.

More from Matt: https://www.thebrink.me/author/matt/