While YOU may not be unemployed if you are in private practice working for yourself (or as a 1099 position), you may have a partner that you rely on to help you with monthly bills.

This is the case for me. And I want to tell you the story of how adding therapy intensives in my practice helped to protect my (and my partner’s) anxiety while he was unemployed for three months.

As brief background, while I was in grad school, my partner earned the majority of our income (obviously), and he’d always held stable unemployment. So I never really worried about being able to pay our monthly bills even when I didn’t have summer employment in between academic semesters.

Don’t get me wrong – we weren’t by any means rolling in buckets of money, but we had enough to get by without feeling too anxious about it.

Fast forward to me moving into private practice and making more than my partner, but still relying on him for his W2 benefits.

He still had a stable job, but now that I was surpassing him in income, he decided to take a risk and join a financial tech company.

I was in full support! He finally felt it wasn’t a financial risk for him to pursue passion over income. And everything was great. He actually had better pay, better benefits. All good right?

And then December 2022 hit…

If you remember, all of the banks and tech companies were having crises and shutting down, and layoffs were happening all over the place.

Aaaand you guessed it. My partner was one of those thousands of people laid off.

Immediate panic hit.

I was making more money, sure (at that point, around $10k months), but we only had a small amount in savings (yay being a millennial) and as we know, private practice isn’t always financially stable or predictable.

At that time, I was seeing maybe 20-25 people per week and feeling pretty exhausted as it was. I couldn’t imagine adding on more weekly clients just to minimally raise my monthly income.

So I did something different.

I started offering therapy intensives – and it has been the BEST thing I’ve done for my business (and therefore my life).

My partner was laid off for three months but in those three months, because of therapy intensives, I brought in $15k, $14k, and $13k (the next month was $23k).

Sure, I was working a little bit more (my therapy intensives range between 6-9hr commitments), but I was making $360-$450 an hour.

For some quick math, at my (then) 60 minute rate of $225, I would have had to add three weekly clients to make an extra $2,700. That’s 12 hours of work.

Or

I charged $2,700 for a 9hr couples therapy intensive.

At a minimum I saved 3 hours of work. AND because my intensives are more adjunctive in nature, it means I’m not having three additional clients on my weekly caseload for some undetermined period of time. Just one commitment to a 9hr intensive.

Now, my 50 minute rate is $275, which means I can earn that same $2,700 in about 6 hours of work.

This is what I’m talking about with intensives allowing you to work smarter, not harder.

You deserve to be paid for not just your time in the chair, but also for your expertise and presence.

You deserve to not have to stress about life’s uncertainties.

You deserve to take a risk and bet on yourself that you CAN sell high-ticket therapy intensives.