We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Krysteena Wilson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Krysteena below.

Krysteena, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s go back in time to when you were an intern or apprentice – what’s an interesting story you can share from that stage of your career?

My early experiences in the field were undoubtedly the defining moments for me in my career that I have today. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my hardships of getting to a place where I had some relative stability in my career have become the biggest motivator in supporting newer therapists who are often mistreated, underpaid, and overworked in this hard job of supporting others.

In my practicum, while I was still in grad school, I interned at a Family Service Agency in Burbank, CA. The interns were funneled into this program like cattle. There were over 100 of us stuffed into one room for orientation. We never received 1:1 supervision because there was no capacity. They maxed our weekly supervision sessions with one, burned out supervisor and 10 interns in every group. There are so many quotes I have burned into my memory from my time working with him and none of them are good.

He said things like, “a good therapist always has some paranoia of being sued by any client. “Trust no one,” and “if we wanted to make money or have an enjoyable career, we shouldn’t have become therapists. We should have become life coaches.” He was known for belittling interns for “saying the wrong thing.” He often criticized the way we navigated tough moments. He always thought our clients were out to get us and tried to make us believe the same. He was the epitome of what I didn’t want to be in this field. I don’t know how many new therapist’s ego’s he damaged, but I’m sure it was a lot.

At this internship site, we were expected to not only work for free, but also to pay an “agency fee” of $100 per month. In grad school, I was attending full-time classes, working full time at a restaurant to make ends meet, interning 15-20 hours per week, and sometimes picking up side jobs just for extra cash. Every client I saw at the agency paid $40-$60 to meet with me and I saw none of that income. I also worked days in 3 different middle schools serving at risk youth. The agency was paid through a grant for this partnership. Again, the interns saw none of the money. Though this is common in our field to not get paid, it’s far from ethical in my opinion. In fact, at the time in California, it was common to not get paid even after graduation. We would get our Master’s degrees in counseling but were not eligible for our license until we accumulated 3,000 supervised hours of therapy experience. Because we couldn’t even hold a preliminary license, we couldn’t bill insurance anywhere we worked, thus companies didn’t want to hire new grads or if they did, they expected them to work for free. I have classmates who worked 3-4 years unpaid as a therapist post-graduation before they could get a paid job.

I wasn’t in a financial position to work for years without getting paid. Three years after graduation I was working full time in a medical office for $18 an hour, still picking up weekends at a restaurant, and working many evenings in a residential facility for teens as a post-grad therapist intern for $12 (in Los Angeles!); IT was exhausting and eventually I decided I was going to leave the field. I literally could not afford to become a therapist.

Fast forward and today I have a thriving group practice and support other therapists in creating a lucrative career that they love. It IS possible to do this as a therapist, but you have to be creative and you have to take matters into your own hands and start a business. After nearly leaving the field, I moved out of LA to Boise, Idaho, tried applying to therapist jobs one last time and found a way to make this career work for me.

Therapists are one of the lowest paid health professions with our level of training and education. Insurance companies are known for limiting coverage for mental health care, denying claims, and paying unsustainable reimbursement rates for therapy. This is a big problem in our country with access to mental health care in general. I could go on a whole other rant about that.

The point is – being a therapist is hard. And many mentors, supervisors, and employers project their own hardships into the field on new therapists entering the field, bursting their bubbles and squashing their dreams. It’s a narrative that I am determined to change in this next leg of my career journey as a private practice consultant. I do not believe it should be this difficult just to make a decent living as a therapist.

Krysteena, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Krysteena – burned-out therapist turned empowered entrepreneur turned private practice consultant and coach. Like many new therapists, I entered this field bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with enthusiasm and energy to boot. But after 3 years of working for low (or no!) pay after graduating with my MA in marriage and family therapy, hitting a dead end around every corner, and imagining a dim future, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore. I fully planned to toss my $80k graduate degree out the window, get some starting position at a boring corporate job, and slowly start to work my way up the ladder in a career I had zero passion for just so I could maybe pay back my student loans. Until I gave this career one last shot, that is – and thank goodness I did. Fast forward to today, 12 years later, I run a thriving boutique group therapy practice and now a second business as a private practice consultant and mentor for therapists looking to start, fill, and scale their therapy practices. Due to my challenges early on in the field, I hold an intense passion for empowering other therapists to value what they do and to create a career they love. If you’re reading this, maybe you’ve swam (drowned) in the sea of therapist-career burnout and are about ready to toss your degree out the window, too…? I’m here to ask you, as a private practice consultant, to please give it one last shot, because that last shot could be the solution you’re looking for!

In a system that continues to devalue mental health care and the therapists that provide it, it’s hard to believe that you can be a good therapist, make a good living, and actually live well (sans burnout), but let me tell you – It’s possible, and I’m living proof.

Currently I have 3 offers to help therapists start, fill, or scale their private practice: The Private Practice Blueprint, The Private Practice Lab, and 1:1 coaching for therapists. The Private Practice Blueprint is my signature course that teaches therapists how to set up a sustainable and profitable private practice where they can earn up to $100k per year while working around 30 hours per week. It’s the exact strategy I used to get my practice making over $100k working Tuesday-Friday and having more time off than ever before in my career.

The Private Practice Lab is a membership specifically for therapists who are looking to level up their practice. In the Lab, therapists learn marketing skills to establish them as an expert in their niche, get off insurance panels that don’t value their worth, and find ways to diversify their income. It’s also a supportive community of like-minded ambitious therapists, all rooting for each other to succeed in their career.

Through 1:1 coaching, my top tier offer, I meet with therapists regularly for several months and support them in scaling their practice. Whether they are interested in growing their team, adding a course or another scalable offer, I help therapists find maximum freedom in their career while achieving their income goals.

I absolutely love the career I have created today with my group practice and in my second business where I support and mentor therapists. I want to teach all therapists that they can truly create a career they love, too!

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

I am a big fan of doing big things in my business with the least energy possible. Though I know how to hustle (as evidenced by my early years in this field), at this phase in my life I’m all about efficiency. When I first opened my practice, I hit marketing hard for about 6 months. Honestly, at the time I didn’t know much about SEO or digital marketing, I didn’t really understand social media, and so although I listed my practice name on those platforms, I didn’t dedicate much attention to them. What worked for me the best in filling my practice quickly (within about 3 months), was networking! I got out in my community as often as I could. I met with other therapists for coffee, I attended networking events for entrepreneurs, I walked into doctor’s offices, I sent old-school mailers, and I collaborated with other small healthcare practices. This got my name out there quickly and started building a strong network of supporters in my community. Then the pandemic hit and my networking efforts had to abruptly stop. My marketing took a complete back seat as I focused on my clients as we were navigating the recent changes in the world. Fortunately, because of the strong relationships I had built in my community, my practice kept growing. I spent some time every quarter checking in and nurturing those relationships but honestly, my marketing for my practice cut down to about 10% of my overall time and my practice stayed full – with a waitlist even! Don’t underestimate the value of getting out of your office and meeting people face to face if you’re starting a business. It was a huge success for me.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

Having a good mentor and/or supervisor as a new therapist is crucial to success. As I mentioned with my experience, those first few years can make or break you in terms of confidence, ability to learn, and belief that you can succeed in this field. It’s unfortunate that good mentors can be a challenge to find for new therapists, but it’s something I always talk to students about when they ask what my top piece of advice is for a new therapist. Additionally, in order to really be successful as a therapist, you have to go through your own work. Therapists need their own therapists. The more we grow in our own personal growth journey, the better we can be there to support our clients. This is a field of continuing growth and evolution and, in my opinion, in order to be really effective in our work we need to take that part of our job seriously.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://aligntherapyshop.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aligntherapyshop/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Aligntherapyshop

Image Credits

Rachel Wolf at https://www.rachelwolfphoto.com/