Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 27: The Future of Therapy Might Look More Like This

Released: 05/01/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda explores what happens when therapists keep waiting to make changes in their practice, even when they know something isn’t working. She shares her own experience of burnout, overworking, and feeling misaligned in the traditional therapy model, and how shifting to therapy intensives created more space, better outcomes, and a more sustainable way of working. Amanda also unpacks the hidden costs of waiting, why taking care of yourself directly impacts client care, and how evolving industry changes—including AI and client demand—make now a powerful time to rethink how you practice.

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3 Key Takeaways:

1. Waiting to change a misaligned therapy model has real costs, including burnout, limited income, and reduced clinical impact, while small intentional shifts can create meaningful change sooner than expected.
2. Therapy intensives can transform both client outcomes and therapist sustainability by allowing deeper work, more flexibility, and increased income without increasing caseload volume.
3. In a rapidly evolving field with AI and changing client needs, offering more personalized, high-touch services like intensives helps therapists stay relevant while building a more aligned and spacious practice.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

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• This episode is sponsored by Alma – learn more here
• This episode is sponsored by Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period

Resources & Links:

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Just a quick heads up, everything I share in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, financial advice, or tax advice. Every practice and every state has its own rules. So if you’re wondering how something applies to your situation, make sure to check in with an attorney, accountant, or another qualified professional who can give you guidance based on your specific circumstances.

Transcript:

Amanda (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist. I want to start this episode just a little bit differently. I know I come on here and I talk a lot about some mindset things to consider, some strategies to implement. Sometimes I lead with a question. And so that is what I’m leading with today of what happens when you wait? When you know something isn’t working in your practice or maybe even in your life.

when you feel stretched way too thin, a little too burned out, like you’re not doing your best work, like your income doesn’t match your effort, and like you just keep going anyway, right? That’s because like most of us therapists do that. We wait, we say, will just figure it out later. I do not have time for this. I just need to get through this season. I just need to get through this day. I just need to get through this hour.

and maybe it’ll feel better soon. Oh my gosh, I cannot tell you how long I have been saying that myself of, I feel like since early 2024, maybe late 2023, I was like, things will get easier, things will slow down after April. And I don’t know why, I don’t know why April, maybe there’s that sense of spring and newness and summer’s coming up. I’m like, maybe, maybe by April. Well, you know, it’s April, 2026.

at this recording and things are still busy. And a lot of that is good busy, but it’s still busy, right? So we are always busy. Life is always going to be busy. So when there’s something we want to work on, when there’s something we want to change, if we keep leaning a little bit too much on figuring out later and maybe it’ll be better soon and you know, months are going to go by. Sometimes years are going to go by and nothing

might really change. And again, like I’m saying, for my life generally, there’s been a lot that’s been happening in my life, personally, professionally, there’s a lot more of a deep dive I’m gonna do on some of the personal stuff that’s been happening in my life. I’m gonna share that more when I’m ready. There’s some logistics and things that I’m waiting for before I do that. But from a professional aspect, I had a lot of that experience with my therapy practice when I first started out.

I was seeing a high number of clients every week, even my like 20 to 22, sometimes 24. That was a lot for me as someone who is autistic and has ADHD and is socially anxious and is an introvert and just generally tends to want to do a lot of things and specializes in complex trauma. That was a lot of work for me. That was a lot, a lot, a lot of work. And so being in…

back-to-back sessions and doing a ton of admin work and trying to be fully present for each person, you know, what I was ultimately feeling like was I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough energy, and honestly, I wasn’t always able to do the depth of work I knew I was capable of doing with my clients. And that was one of the hardest parts, because it wasn’t like I didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing. It was, I don’t have the space to do what I know works.

I was just doing what everyone else said you’re supposed to do in your private practice of have these 45 to 60 minute sessions and have somewhere between 20 to it seems like 35 of them. That’s what I felt like everyone was doing when I started my private practice. And so I just kept thinking, maybe I just need to push through this and maybe this is just what private practice is. At least it’s better than my agency or maybe this is the price of being a therapist.

But over time, it really started to feel like I was working a lot, giving a lot, and not getting the level of fulfillment or sustainably I thought I would just by leaving my agency that was burning me out and not appreciating me and ultimately making me feel like I just couldn’t keep doing it. I just couldn’t keep being a therapist if I were to stay at that agency, which is why I left, but that didn’t.

inherently fix all of my problems. It just created new ones. And so fairly early in my private practice, about six months into it, I started to experiment with prolonged sessions of, if in part I’m getting stuck with my clients because we don’t have enough time, what if we just had more time? In 2022, when I started my private practice, most of my caseload was private pay. I did also panel with

⁓ one EAP and then I joined Alma and took one insurance plan. So I had kind of a, wasn’t necessarily like an even split three ways caseload, but I had two or three insurance clients. had one to two EAP clients and then anywhere between like 10 to 15 plus private pay out of network clients. And so generally with the majority of my caseload I got to do,

whatever I wanted, because I wasn’t restricted by how long the EAP said you can meet with them for, or how long insurance says you can work with someone before you can’t be reimbursed anymore. But when I started to hear about some therapists just saying, yeah, I offer 75 minute sessions. Yeah, I offer 90 minute sessions. I was like, what? That’s so cool. I want to do that too. And I wish I could say I just immediately jumped in, but I didn’t because I didn’t really know.

what I was doing, does that literally just mean go an extra 15 minutes, just schedule an extra 30 minutes at the end of the session? How did I have conversations with clients about that, especially when they are where they were at that point, really relying on out of network reimbursement. So again, I questioned it. I doubted, know, is this something I can really make work? Is this something that my clients even want to do? And really what I told myself was, yeah, it’s probably not going to work for me. It feels like maybe

too big of a shift and just like generally what if it doesn’t work? What if I get really excited about this model and it doesn’t work for me? But once I actually gave myself time to sit down and think about if I were to do this focused session, and for me again, I work with complex trauma and I work with couples and oftentimes one or both members have complex trauma. So if I were to create a focused session on

here are the things you’re really struggling with. If we had one to two days, multiple hours each day, to just really focus on that and do as much work as we could in that time, well then why not just like see, why not just see if someone would be interested in doing that? And so that’s exactly what I did in January, 2023. So this was nine-ish months into my private practice. I started working on

What was my structure? What was my outline? How was I going to talk about it with clients? I started drafting my webpage for intensives. And within a month, I got my first consultation booked and we booked for about a month later and legit everything changed. I do not say that lightly because you know, initially what that meant was I got really excited about intensives. More people kept coming for intensives.

I say this all the time, again, I’m an introvert. I do not like networking. That is not what I do for my practice. But people kept contacting me by finding my website from Google, or maybe they found me from Psychology Today and then they went to my website. They kept finding me. They kept seeing my intensive services. And then they would reach out and be like, this sounds amazing, can I do it? So I kept being busy with intensives and especially moving into summer, I actually got more busy with intensives.

I was really busy with intensives even December, which a lot of us feel like are really slow times and seasons in private practice. So initially I got so excited that I even over overbooked myself, right? My whole point was like, I want to do therapy differently. I want to do these extended sessions, but I didn’t quite yet feel ready to make the change of letting my weekly and biweekly sessions go because

I had the scarcity mindset, right? I had these thoughts and these fears of, every time someone books an intensive, it’s just a fluke, right? There’s not gonna be any way that this can be consistent. Well, I guess, you this is the one I’m booking for this entire year, but you know, that did change. Obviously, a lot of you have probably heard my stats on how I’ve booked over 107 intensives and brought in over $150,000 just from intensives.

while being a very, part-time therapist. But again, I didn’t start that way because I was having my very full caseload and doing intensives on the side. There would be days where legitimately I would probably work 10 to 12 days in a row because I would work Monday through Friday and then I might do a two-day intensive on the weekend. And then I go right back into working like Monday through Tuesday and then maybe I gave myself Wednesday off or, you know, why not just go from Monday through?

the following Friday. So what would that be? Is that 12 days in a row? I think so. So I was doing that. I do not recommend it, but what that was ultimately teaching me was that intensives were stable. People would continue to come back for intensives, whether it was the same person to come back for repeat intensives or one to two people reaching out for an intensive because my whole goal

was to be part-time in private practice, I didn’t need a ton of people reaching out each month for that, right? So depending on what your practice looks like, you may make different decisions on that. But once I really allowed myself to be safe in trusting that more people were gonna book therapy intensives, I allowed myself to start to transition some clients out, clients who were maybe in more maintenance mode or clients who we were never really a great fit anyway, but I just

took them on because I was worried about money or people who we kind of outgrew one another. And so once I did that, once I allowed myself to let go of some what felt like safe clients, then I finally had more time in my schedule. I actually had more space between clients. There are times these days where I see a client on like Monday for an hour and then I see a client on like Thursday for an hour.

Sometimes I go a whole week without seeing clients. Sometimes I go multiple weeks, especially if I’m traveling internationally. So legitimately, both in a day and within a given week, I just have so much more space in my calendar, which frees up my emotional capacity too, which then also meant I had more energy to show up more present and more full. And something that I didn’t really expect was that I felt like a better therapist.

It’s not necessarily that I got more trainings and get certified in all of the things under the sun, but because I wasn’t rushing or switching between clients constantly or trying to fit deep work into small windows, I had the time to actually follow the process and to stay with things longer and to go deeper with my clients. And this is something I really want to make explicit because I think a lot of us therapists struggle with it.

Taking care of yourself and putting that as the priority in your business is not separate from taking care of your clients. Taking care of ourselves is taking care of our clients because when we have more energy, have more capacity, are not burnt out, are not stretched thin, we actually are able to be more present, more attuned, and do better work.

because we’re not overly stressed about high acuity clients and managing all the admin and also trying to have a life and be a human on top of all of that while potentially managing financial stress and duress. The thing is that the traditional therapy model doesn’t support all those things for those who might be underprivileged. If you have all the financial privilege in the world, you don’t have debts to worry about, you are not

someone who’s oppressed and marginalized, you have a lot of privilege, right? Just to like name that. But for those of us who have historically been oppressed are currently victims of some type of, know, ism out there, there is so much life stuff that can get in the way with doing, running a therapy practice and doing therapy in a way that it feels like we’re supposed to do as therapists, right? That whole, ⁓

Being accessible, financially accessible is what people specifically are saying at the sake of anything. The traditional therapy model rewards volume. How many clients can you see over extension? How hard can you work for all of those clients and just pushing through? Well, it doesn’t matter if you’re sick or if you yourself would like to have a mental health day because you cannot afford to take a day off. And over time, that really catches up with us, right?

when it feels like one of the whole reasons we go into private practice is because we are seeking that freedom and that lack of burnout and really wanting to feel empowered to do the work that we do, if all of a sudden now it seems like we have problems that we can’t work ourselves out of, well then, you know, what is plan C, right? Like if plan A is do the, what looks like a safe thing that comes with benefits and it has PTO and…

I don’t have to market myself. Plan B becomes private practice, but that doesn’t work out either because none of us know what we’re doing when we initially start out. Do you have a plan C then? Right? It’s not necessarily that you need one, but I think that’s where a lot of therapists I’ve talked with, that’s where they are emotionally is thinking about, I thought this was the answer and I guess it’s not. So now what? And I also want to zoom out for a second because I started talking a little bit about this.

in a previous episode around state of the economy and how that’s impacting a lot of things within therapy and how people are running a therapy practice. But there’s also some state of the industry stuff when it comes to AI. We are in a really interesting moment in this field because as you know, AI is booming. Access to information is growing. People can get coping tools and education and frameworks.

without ever seeing a therapist. So what keeps our work valuable, right? I know if you are like me, you’ve probably seen a ton of social media posts or blogs, newsletters, whatever on AI is replacing therapists and lots of people are losing their jobs to AI. And if you’re like me, you’ve also seen posts around the downsides of AI. ⁓

and how it is never actually going to take our jobs because what keeps our work valuable at the end of the day, right? You might know all this information. You might have made all your own worksheets and have all this stuff that is amazing. But what keeps our work as therapists valuable is depth, relationship, nuance, and human connection. And when it comes to how you can really embrace those in your therapy practice,

Therapy intensives actually lean into that because they create a deeper experience. They create a more intentional container. They create something that can’t be replicated by a chat bot or a quick Google search. So if you are thinking, how do I stay relevant? How do I keep my work meaningful? This is a part of that conversation. This is not just about how do I

market myself and try to keep up with the ever-growing AI changes or how do I, I guess, diversify my income outside of therapy because I’m never going to be able to make it as a therapist long-term. But this is about if I’m worried I can’t offer the same amount of support that AI is offering in terms of being a supportive ear and giving some coping tools. If that’s genuinely something that you’re worried about, then

This is where we’re considering what can we do differently, right? Therapy intensives are something that is so different than what’s been out there for years. And they’re gonna continue to be something that AI can never compete with, right? I can stare at my phone all day and have these days I’m trying to use Claude more than ChatGPT. So I can have my AI of choice open and I can chat with it all day long.

But I’m not building that connection. I’m not building emotional intimacy. I’m just maybe feeling good if I’m getting compliments, but I know that it’s AI and that it’s acting that way. I don’t actually believe that an AI cares about me, right? I don’t even know if that’s the official grammar for that. An AI, if AI, whatever. But let’s come back to this question that I posed at the beginning of what happens when you wait?

If we wait to make changes, whatever that is in our practice, then we stay in the same schedule, the same income structure, the same level of capacity, and you keep telling yourself, I’ll figure it out later, but later turns into another few months or years or cycles of feeling stretched. And I say this with a lot of compassion, and I have needed to hear this myself over and over, because honestly,

Waiting has a cost and that is not just financially but it is in your energy it’s in your quality of life and Honestly, it’s in your ability to do your best work as a therapist the more that we wait to fix our burnout problems the more that we wait to fix our financial problems the more that we wait to actually take movement on the very viable solutions that are out there

It’s costing us way more than our paycheck, right? And it is making us, it’s making us, you know, not as quality therapists. I’m going to take a strong of a stance to say that. I think we’re doing a bad job of being therapists if we are telling our clients to take care of themselves and we can’t do the same thing because we’re engaging in people pleasing behaviors. And so I want to add one more layer to this, which is timing.

because right now, again, I’m filming this in April, 2026, it’s gonna air in May, 2026. So right now we are heading into summer and summer is honestly the best time for therapy intensives because a lot of clients are taking more time off and they have a little bit more flexibility and they also have more willingness to do deeper work because they still know they want therapy, it’s just.

Maybe they’re traveling or maybe their schedule looks different, especially if they’re a parent who now is working around kids having time off from school. Right. But people still want therapy. So this means it’s one of the easiest times to start offering intensives. If this has been something you’ve been thinking about, this isn’t just something that is theory. Right. This isn’t just maybe I can do that and maybe there’s a right way for it to look or

I don’t even know what I’m doing. Like right now you have the ability to do something that is actionable, relevant, and aligned with what clients are already looking for. I said this on the last podcast episode about recently therapy intensives are starting to become a little more, I’m not saying pops like quite yet. It’s not like the word toxic or narcissistic. ⁓

But more people are going to start hearing about them and more people are going to start looking for them. And so if you have been listening to this podcast episode specifically, but some of the recent ones and thinking, okay, I know something needs to change. I do not want to keep doing it this way forever. I want more time. I want more space. I want better outcomes for my clients. I really want you to consider what happens if you don’t make a change and also

what could happen if you did. If you did finally decide, I’m going to stop waiting. I am going to find a little bit of time in my schedule to make a little bit of changes because we don’t have to overhaul everything at once. You don’t have to take a look at your schedule and be like, and tomorrow I’m dropping all insurance panels and raising my rate $100 and only doing therapy intensives. That’s not realistic. But giving yourself 30 minutes this week to really think about what do you want for

know, quarters three and four of 2026. I almost had 2024. What do I want for 2027? Thinking about what you can do and what are some small actionable steps you can take to make that happen. That is exactly why I created My Therapy Intensive’s Academy to help therapists shift their model, increase their income, and create more sustainable, spacious practices, all while having

better personal lives, quite honestly, to see how happy and how much more fulfilled some of the therapists I’ve worked with are. Honestly, it is very heartwarming for me. It feels very similar to the work I do with my therapy clients. I help people finally put themselves first. This isn’t about starting anything from scratch. This isn’t about, it’s going to take forever and it’s going to be too much work and it’s going to be impossible.

but right now is your time to make this change. With demand increasing and summer coming up, this is a really powerful time to step into this. And if you want support in learning how to structure your unique intensive offerings, how to price them so that they are in alignment with your needs and with your cost of living in your area and how do we also still make you really show as the…

the valuable authoritative figure that you are and actually get clients to fill them, you can check out the Therapy Intensive Academy through the link in the show notes to learn more about if and how that is the right fit for you. I’m also always available for answering questions, so please reach out. And really, I just want you to remember that you do not need to keep waiting. You can choose something different, and it might change more than you expect.

and your life could change sooner than you expect. So that’s what I have for today. I hope that that was helpful to hear. I hope that that was a good reminder for those of you who sometimes need what I have heard, that kick in the pants. Like I just need someone to give it to me straight. I needed someone to just coach me a little bit through that. And a lot of my job as a coach is not just to support people and…

problem solve, but a lot of it is to challenge people and to acknowledge when they are getting in their own way with keeping vision over in tunnel A when really they want to be in tunnel B. So yeah, I hope that you got what you needed from today’s episode. Thank you so much for tuning in and I’ll talk with you next week.