Brainspotting: Helping Therapists with Business Blocks, Marketing Fears, and Your Money Mindset
You became a therapist (or other healer) because you wanted to help people. You have unique skills and talents that the world needs. You love your work, but being a business owner in private practice has thrown you some unexpected challenges.
From the discomfort of marketing — being seen and worrying what others will think — to your questions around money, fees, and taxes shutting you down emotionally, it’s not uncommon to get stuck in a cycle of inaction. You might find your old trauma responses or burnout patterns replaying themselves in your business, and you don’t know how to get out of it.
You weren’t prepared for how much this business journey was going to involve your own personal growth. You wish that you could just set that other stuff aside and get on with running your business. But you can’t do that when your business is YOU.
We’re here to help! Let’s look together at some common areas where therapist practice owners get stuck.
Basics of Business Blocks in Private Practice
Business blocks are the mental and emotional challenges that get in the way of moving forward with your private practice. Our personal blocks to business growth are often more about the meanings and stories we bring to the concept than the actual concept itself.
Here’s one example:
Deciding the fee for your services is pretty simple math. We can look at how much money you need to take home, how many hours you’re available to work, and figure out what you need to charge per session pretty quickly. But for most helpers and healers starting businesses, this fee-setting doesn't feel that straightforward.
Instead, many therapists in private practice find themselves comparing to what others are charging, battling guilt for charging people they want to help, worrying about judgements from others for a high fee, and entertaining fears about whether they’re worthy of charging. There are a heap of other stories and meanings that complicate setting our fee.
Hello, Business Blocks!!
Common Business Blocks in Private Practice
Imposter syndrome
Shame
Fear of being seen
Comparisons
Feelings of unworthiness
Money trauma
Replicating burnout systems from community mental health
How to Know if You’re Dealing with Business Blocks in Private Practice
Panic or shutdown are often signs you’re dealing with business blocks. Imagine you encounter an aspect of business growth: marketing, taxes, fees, holding boundaries with clients, etc. — the specifics don’t matter. It’s about asking yourself “How am I feeling?”
If the answer is one of being numb, freaking out, fear, avoidant, anything beyond grounded and calm, you likely have a block around the growth. If you just can’t seem to implement something, then you may be dealing with business blocks. It makes sense in your head, and you don’t know what’s stopping you from just doing the thing!
If you find yourself continually avoiding something (no matter how much you know it would improve your life), you’re dancing with your business blocks.
When you’re confronted with business blocks, building your solo or group practice is harder than it needs to be. You spend so much extra energy fighting the shutdown, managing your anxiety, and dealing with your avoidance. It doesn’t have to be that hard!
Let’s talk about some of the most common roots of business blocks that we see.
Business Block #1: Marketing Fears in Private Practice
How will the people you want to work with know that you’re available to help them?
It’s simple: Private practice marketing!
Marketing? You wish that wasn’t the answer. You don’t know how to do marketing — or, even if you do, it takes time and energy that you’d rather be spending on seeing clients!
There are lots of decisions to make: Should you pay for online ads, get business cards, or build a website that brings in the right clients? All those options have led to a lot of overwhelm and you end up stuck, not making a decision at all.
If the idea of marketing sends you into a panic, confusion, or total shutdown, you’re facing a normal business block in private practice.
We get it. Putting yourself out there in your marketing message is scary. This is likely something you’ve never done before. And you’re not just selling some product you like; you’re selling you!
You’ve probably had at least one of these fears:
Common Marketing Fears
Who will see this?
Will my colleagues think I’m full of myself?
Who will want to work with me?
Why should someone choose me? Aren’t there other therapists out there better at this?
I do amazing work! What if everyone sees this and it grows big faster than I can handle?
What if no one sees this?
What if I don’t know what I’m talking about?
What will people think?
Sometimes these fears are expected responses to doing something new, and sometimes they’re rooted in deeper stories about times in the past when it wasn’t safe for us to be seen, or our unique constellation of identities within our society. The beautiful thing is that you don’t have to know where the fears come from for us to help you.
(More on how we have a fun tool to help in a bit!)
Business Block #2: Money Mindset and Fees
Many of us have stories about money and what it means. Money gets all connected in with our sense of worth, our sense of safety, our standing in our communities. Living in a capitalist society, it makes sense that we would have subconsciously (or consciously) made some of these connections. So be kind to yourself if you find you’re struggling with money and fees.
These blocks can come up for therapists in private practice in any of the following ways:
Shutting down
Believing “I”m just not good with money”
Underearning
Overworking
Never feeling like you have enough money
Not saving money
Living paycheck to paycheck
Not holding boundaries with clients around late cancellations and no-shows
Sliding your fee to accommodate anyone who asks
Hoping it all just works out somehow
Common Money Fears in Private Practice
All of these blocks can be driven by some serious fears in private practice. Let’s see if you’ve ever experienced some of these:
Fear of asking too much, being greedy
Fear of being exploitative
Fear of creating inaccessible services and not serving everyone equally
Fear of there still not being enough
The fears are what feeds the block and leads to the inaction. It’s only in addressing those that you can find a release from the block’s grip and start to move forward.
Business Block #3: Past Trauma
We can often replay our old trauma stories in the ways we run our businesses. We might overfunction, caretake, hide, avoid, shutdown, or overcontrol our way through.
No one ever prepared us for how much our trauma would play out in our businesses. It’s the biggest mirror that we’ve ever found, but it’s also presented as one of the biggest playgrounds for healing.
Ways Trauma Shows Up for Many of Our Clients and Ourselves:
Lack of boundaries
Projection of fear into every business decision
Decreased trust in others
Self-sabotaging behavior to protect ourselves from a different narrative
Choosing to hire people who replicate old relationship patterns
Chaos and disorder that’s familiar but costs money, energy, and time in the business
Yes, we love therapy — we all have been through therapy. But when we play with doing things differently in our private practices, we start to discover a new story of how things can be. Our businesses can be a safer space to experience something corrective before we internalize it for ourselves. But we also have found something incredible to help therapists break through their blocks and heal trauma, while improving their businesses.
Brainspotting for Your Private Practice Business Blocks
Brainspotting is an an effective brain-body modality for helping you move beyond the things that have you stuck. It can be done virtually, making it accessible for anyone with a Zoom room. Many therapists have heard of Brainspotting — but only used in a therapeutic setting. Brainspotting can be used in a coaching context as well!
All of our coaches are trained in at least Level 1 Brainspotting, and we use it weekly to help therapists like you break through business blocks, marketing fears, and money mindset issues!
Brainspotting is particularly effective for those things that don’t make sense to you — “I don’t know why I avoid this” — because it doesn’t require your prefrontal cortex. Brainspotting targets areas in the midbrain where those emotional blocks lie.
So take any of those blocks you’ve identified and let’s just imagine for a moment:
What would life look like if you didn’t have those blocks anymore?
Go ahead, let’s see if we can get a glimpse into the possibilities!!
See, we don’t believe you’re broken or that you shouldn’t have blocks. Blocks are normal. But we do believe you don’t have to suffer with them and wrestle them into submission for them to dissipate. Tools like Brainspotting can help dissolve their power in just one session (or a few).
Our clients have had amazing results with Brainspotting.
After just one session, we’ve had clients say:
“I’m not afraid to blog anymore.”
“I go about my work and that critical voice is just gone.”
“I can see how I’ve been the one holding me back.”
One of our coaching clients had an old story, rooted in trauma, about how being seen was fundamentally unsafe. The person would just shut down when they tried to write blogs or copy for their website and they didn’t know why.
In two Brainspotting sessions, they were able to see how the old story was playing out, really feel that this situation is different, and move forward with their marketing. They’re now confidently attracting full-fee clients to their practice.
What could be different in your life and business if Brainspotting helped remove the blocks?
When you join Business School for Therapists, you get 1 coaching session where you can use Brainspotting to help you with the business blocks. It’s not just about growing in knowledge, though; it’s about overcoming internal battles that get you stuck so you can take that knowledge and catalyze it into real results for your private practice.
Ready to create a values-aligned life and business with a sustainable income and real, impactful clinical outcomes? Learn more about Business School for Therapists.
