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

Hi Alicia, thanks for joining us today. Can you share a story about the kindest thing someone has done for you and why it mattered so much or was so meaningful to you?

Throughout my life, I’ve been lucky enough to have an army of unexpected angels—family, friends, and strangers—do enormously kind things for me. For this article, I want to highlight my therapist, for soon to be obvious reasons. This particular moment of great kindness involves a bathtub full of my daughter in calamine lotion, my young mom self, and one very wise psychoanalyst.

When my daughter was five, she got the chickenpox. It was pretty bad. I was a young, broke single mom, working my way through grad school and running on cliff bars. Back then, therapy wasn’t on Zoom; if you wanted help, you had to drag yourself to an office and collapse dramatically on a couch, Freudian-style.

My therapist, like all good therapists, had a 24-hour cancellation policy. Miss your session? You paid. No excuses. And while I firmly support this policy as a professional, life is nothing if not full of humanness.

Somewhere in the chaos of sleeplessness and mom brain, I remembered—22 hours before my session—that there was no way I could make it the next day. Panicked, I called my therapist. I explained the situation: I was exhausted, my daughter was a human polka dot, and I simply wouldn’t leave her side. I apologized profusely and her response was, “I’m sorry to hear that. I hope she’s okay. You’ll still have to pay!”

Something snapped in me. I blame the stress and her calm delivery of those words… and I really lost it. I let her have it—respectfully but passionately. I told her I’d never missed before. I told her I wasn’t trying to waste her time. I told her that I deeply respected her boundaries, but I was a human being doing her best under impossible circumstances and I told her 22 hours is only shy of 2 hours and that she was being unreasonable. Oh, and also that I couldn’t afford to pay for a missed session because, hi, grad school.

I braced myself for her reaction. But instead of defensiveness or an awkward attempt at justification THAT WE ARE ALL USED TO, she simply said,

“I’m so proud of you!”

I’m so proud of you, hung in the air of my utter shock. She didn’t charge me for the session, but that wasn’t the real gift. What she gave me was the freedom to be angry and to believe that my feelings and boundaries mattered just as much as anyone else’s. Our culture had raised me to swallow anger, to shove it down so deep it turned into self-doubt or guilt. And just so you know, repressed anger has to go somewhere. For many women, it reemerges as self-hatred aimed at random things—like, say, your thighs. One minute you’re upset at someone rightfully, and the next, you’re staring in a mirror thinking, you know what’s the real problem? These thighs.

But here was someone showing me that anger—expressed honestly and healthfully—was nothing to be ashamed of.

Therapists are special like that. They aren’t living their lives tangled up in our baggage or biases. They simply want us to be emotionally healthy. My therapist saw an exhausted young mom who needed to advocate for herself, and instead of punishing me, she empowered me. It’s one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I became a therapist after therapy changed my life. At the time, I was working as an actor and musician. After a traumatic event, a friend connected me with a therapist, and through EMDR, I started to heal. My therapist’s energy, kindness, and cult leader but cool vibe inspired me. That’s when it hit me: Wait, you can be a therapist and still be rad?

Now, I specialize in working with creatives because I am one. My approach is all about meeting people where they are—whether it’s traditional therapy over Zoom or helping clients in their own environments. I’ve worked everywhere: on movie sets, in soup kitchens, and even in people’s kitchens. What I’m most proud of is connecting with people in a way that feels real and personal, no matter their background.

These days, I’m merging my passions through Xanyland, my podcast coming out early next year, where I talk to comedians about their mental health journeys. We cover everything from diagnoses to recovery with honesty and humor. I also had the privilege of speaking about mental health during a TEDx talk. To me, mental health is about feeling seen and understood, and if we can laugh along the way, even better.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Relationships! That is the best way. Great relationships with your clients, with your audience, with your supporters, with other therapists/coaches and most definitely psychiatrists.

Strategies that work for me:
I am terrible at “networking” but at its root, networking is just making new relationships and building friendships.
I strive to make therapy less clinical meaning I see you as a person, you see me as a person, now let’s talk about…whatever!
And, yes you need a nice website and psychology today, but they won’t feed your family. Focus on being a good friend.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

I always thought I’d be more like an actor playing a therapist on tv instead of a real shrink who works with people on tv. And there’s still a chance that may happen, BUT I’ve had the opportunity to really help people, and really see them change. Creating these wonderful relationships and spending years developing people’s “characters”. I’m show running my own show but none of it is fiction! It’s real people, getting real help which is so rewarding.

I think truthfully, the goal is to end up being all of the above. Hell, maybe I’ll write a psychodrama! Uhhh so to answer you’re question, yes I’d do it all the same!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://aliciaracine.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liciaracine/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicia-racine-lmhc-lpcc-7a3a13161
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@aliciaracinefink

Image Credits

Jill Petracek

Andrew Max Levy