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

Alright, Brittani thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

I took a risk by leaving my job during the pandemic to teach and build my private practice, Soul Care Counseling & Consulting, LLC. I guess you can say I am part of the Great Resignation now that I process it which was not planned.

During the pandemic, I was working for an insurance company as a Care Coordinator helping individuals with mental health and substance abuse needs. I throughly enjoyed my position because at my core, I enjoy helping people. However, I became burned out and desired something different. Leaving my job was never a thought, honestly. I thought I could tap into teaching and perhaps some individual counseling on the side, yet still hold my main job during the pandemic.

I actually started working with BetterHelp to help with my desire to connect with people. It helped a little, but then my desire to teach continued to grow. Out of curiosity, I talked with a few friends I knew who were teaching, and they encouraged me to just apply. After counsel, I decided to apply to teach part time as a part of the Virginia Commonwealth University graduate social work program. Without any prior teaching experience, I landed the position.

I took the position because I believed I could work with my main job to flex my schedule. Optimistically, I decided to e-mail my supervisor with the update and requested to be able to flex my schedule to accommodate teaching once a week. However, it didn’t go as planned. She informed me that they would not be able to accommodate my needs and would not allow me to flex my schedule.

Of course, this posed a problem. I had already taken the job with the VCU social work program. After careful consideration, I decided to take on the risk, choose myself, and left my job to teach.

At the same time all of this was happening, I was creating my private practice, Soul Care Counseling & Consulting, LLC, to do it on the side. It was never a thought to do private practice full time. But when my job told me they could not accommodate my request, I took the part-time position to teach and set my eyes to build my private practice full-time.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My faith is the most important thing in my life and I wanted to be able to marry spirituality and counseling in my work because they intersect so often. When I was going through postpartum depression with my son, I knew I wanted a therapist who understood the importance of my faith and who could incorporate it into our therapeutic process. I researched for faith-based therapists in my area at the time and found very few available therapists and found none that looked like me.

In August 2021, I opened Soul Care to offer faith based services to individuals in the community looking to incorporate their faith in their emotional healing journey.

I believe this sets us apart from others because I have gotten so many referrals that tell me that there aren’t many black owned, faith based private practices in my community. They tell me that their faith is important to them and they want to connect with a therapist who will not only acknowledge their faith, but incorporate it in their treatment process. Which I can relate to because when I was looking for myself, I found it very difficult to find a therapist that met my faith and emotional needs.

My dream for my practice is to be able to build a business that will serve the community and churches in my area. I would like Soul Care to partner with other faith based organizations and provide trainings and counselings for individuals and organizations to improve upon their mental health and emotional journey.

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

If I could go back, I would absolutely choose the same profession and specialty. However; I would learn about business while I was in school. Graduate school equipped us to be great helping professionals, but they do not prepare us to understand the business side of running a private practice.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

Doing your own emotional work is essential to succeed in this field. As a therapist, we hold space for many people who are trying to overcome their own life stressors and struggles. Grief, depression, anxiety, and trauma are all things that we are helping our clients walk through. If we, as therapists, are not aware of our own stressors and struggles and are actively walking through them with our own support/therapist, we can do more harm than good. I can only take my client as far as I am willing to go in my own personal healing. With this in mind, we are able to succeed. When we learn to put our own proverbial oxygen mask on first, we can more successfully help our clients put on theirs.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://soulcarewellness.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_thecouchpod/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittani-sanders-lcsw-1758152b/
• Other: Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@becomingb17

Image Credits
Terri Baskin Photography