I'm Going to Be a Bummer
What every counseling, psychology, and social work student should read before they decide what they want to do with their degree
I want to be upfront with you: this is not a hype piece.
You will find plenty of those. You’ll find Instagram accounts and Substacks and online courses promising you a full caseload, a six-figure income, and the freedom to work from anywhere—all within your first year of practice. Some of those people are telling the truth about their own experience. Most are selling something.
I’m not trying to talk you out of this work. I love this work. But I am going to tell you some things that your graduate program probably won’t, and I’d rather you hear them now than figure them out the hard way—the way a lot of us did.
A note before we dive in: I write from the world of private practice, and most of what follows lives there. But some of it bleeds into the field more broadly—into community mental health, agency work, nonprofit settings, all of it. Take what applies to where you’re headed and hold the rest loosely.
So. Deep breath. Here we go.
You are entering the healthcare system.
Take a moment to actually sit with that. Think about your own experiences with healthcare. Think about your family’s. Think about the stories you’ve heard from clients before you even had clients—the billing nightmares, the insurance denials, the providers who burned out and left, the people who fell through gaps that weren’t supposed to exist.
That is the system you are walking into. Not as a patient. As a provider. And the system does not treat its providers well either.
This isn’t a reason not to go. It is a reason to go in clear-eyed.
You will feel let down by a field that told you it was different.
You chose this profession, at least in part, because it seemed to value people. Empathy, inclusion, cultural humility—these aren’t fringe concepts in counseling and social work, they’re embedded in the language of the field itself. The ethics codes say it. The training programs say it. And you believed it, reasonably, because the values felt aligned with your own.
And then you start looking for yourself in it.
If you hold intersectional, marginalized identities—if you are a clinician of color, a queer clinician, a clinician with a disability, a clinician whose lived experience sits outside the dominant cultural assumptions baked into most training models—you will likely discover, sooner than you’d like, that the profession’s stated values and its actual infrastructure are not the same thing.
The representation gaps are real. In the literature, in the leadership of professional organizations, in the faculty of graduate programs, in the therapists whose names circulate as authorities in the field. The practical resources—the ones that speak directly to your specific experience of navigating this work, building a practice, managing the particular weight of doing this labor while also carrying identities that the broader culture does not always protect—are harder to find than they should be. Sometimes they barely exist at all.
You entered a profession that speaks the language of inclusion fluently and has not yet done the full work of living it. That gap is real, it is not your imagination, and it is not yours to fix alone.
And yet. You may find yourself fixing it anyway—or at least being asked to. There is a particular exhaustion that comes with being one of the few people in a room who represents a specific identity or community, and having that fact become the most visible thing about you. You get called on to educate. To contextualize. To speak for an entire group of people whose experiences are not monolithic and cannot be summarized in a consultation meeting or a panel discussion. The role of spokesperson is rarely chosen—it tends to get assigned—and the feelings that come with it are genuinely mixed. You may feel a responsibility to show up in that way because the alternative is silence, and silence has its own cost. You may also feel the weight of carrying something that was never supposed to be yours to carry alone.
You may end up creating your own resources because the existing ones don’t serve you. Your own reading lists, your own referral networks, your own consultation spaces with people who get it without needing an explanation first. That labor is real and it is generative and it is also exhausting in a way that people outside of it don’t always see.
Finding your community may require more effort than it should. And building it yourself—which many of us have had to do—is both an act of necessity and, in its own complicated way, an act of love for the people who come after you.
It can feel lonely. It can feel like a profound disappointment from a field that promised something different. And in some ways, it is—it is a microcosm of its time, reflecting back the same structural failures and cultural gaps that exist everywhere else, dressed up in the language of healing.
Name the disappointment when you feel it.
The gap between your degree and your license is larger than anyone tells you.
I can only speak from my experience as a counselor, but I suspect this resonates across disciplines: you cannot do much with a graduate degree alone. You need supervised hours. You need to pass licensure exams. You need to accumulate the kind of clinical experience that qualifies you for independent practice—and that process takes years, often costs money, and frequently pays you very little while it’s happening.
The debt you take on in graduate school does not pause while you complete supervision. The bills don’t wait. And the supervised positions that give you hours often come with low wages, high caseloads, and organizational cultures that have normalized therapist burnout as a cost of doing business.
This is not a character flaw in the people who built those systems. It is a structural problem. But knowing that doesn’t make it easier to live inside of.
You are new here—and that is both harder and more useful than you think.
Maybe you’re coming straight from undergrad into a master’s program. Maybe you’re a career changer, someone who spent years doing something else entirely before deciding this was the work you wanted to do. Maybe you’re somewhere in between. Whatever your path, the same thing is true: these are all first experiences for you. And that matters.
There is a particular bind that comes with being newer to a field that asks you to hold other people’s most difficult material. You know things—genuinely, you do. You bring your life, your instincts, your training, your perspective. None of that disappears because you haven’t been doing this for twenty years. But you also don’t know things yet. And the tricky part is that it isn’t always obvious which is which in the moment.
The clinicians I’ve watched grow the fastest are not the ones who performed confidence they didn’t have. They’re the ones who could hold both at once—who could say, internally, I have something to offer here and I am still learning what I don’t know without one canceling the other out. That’s not a soft skill. That’s a clinical orientation.
Curiosity and humility aren’t the opposites of competence. They are competence, at this stage.
Lean into your questions. Stay in supervision. Don’t perform expertise you haven’t earned yet—but don’t shrink from the knowledge and presence you do bring. The work will teach you. Let it.
You will take things personally. That’s information—but it’s not always the truth.
A client will terminate. Maybe with notice, maybe without. Maybe with a kind email, maybe with silence. And before you can stop yourself, you will have already assigned meaning to it—something I said, something I missed, something I am. The story writes itself fast, and it is rarely generous.
This is where the noise lives. The doubt that asks whether you’re actually good at this. The replay of a session moment—something you said, a pause that went too long, an interpretation that landed wrong—that you will return to at 2am like it holds the answer to a question you haven’t fully formed yet. This is imposter syndrome in its most specific, clinical shape: not just abstract self-doubt, but a client walking out the door and your nervous system deciding that’s evidence.
It is not always evidence. Sometimes a client leaves because they got what they needed. Sometimes because life got in the way. Sometimes because the fit wasn’t right—and that is allowed, and it has nothing to do with your worth as a clinician.
And then there’s the feedback that comes from the people around you—supervisors, peers, consultation groups. Some of it will land well. Some of it will land like a challenge you want to argue with, and some of it will send you inward in ways that shut you down instead of opening you up. You will have reactions. That is also information. The question isn’t whether to feel it—you will—but how to sort through it. What is useful here, and what can I set down? What is this person seeing that I might be avoiding, and what is this just not mine to carry?
You don’t have to absorb every piece of feedback as though it is the complete truth about you. You also don’t get to dismiss all of it because it’s uncomfortable.
The practice is learning to stay in that middle space—neither collapsing nor deflecting—and it takes time, probably more time than you think it will.
This is part of why your own therapy matters. Because you will need somewhere to take all of this that isn’t back into the room with your clients.
You need to sort out your relationship with money.
This is true even if you never want to own a business. Even if your entire plan is to work in community mental health or a nonprofit or a school system, you will still have to navigate compensation that often feels misaligned with the depth of work you’re doing.
And if private practice is anywhere in your future—if the idea of having your own caseload, setting your own hours, building something that’s yours has ever crossed your mind—then this is not optional. You need to understand your own money story. What you believe you’re worth. What you were taught to believe about people who charge for their time. The guilt that can creep in when someone pays you for sitting with their pain.
Those beliefs will shape every financial decision you make in this field, often without you realizing it. Doing the work now is not just good personal development—it is professional preparation.
You also need to sort out your relationship with being seen.
We ask our clients to be vulnerable. We sit with them inside the most uncomfortable corners of their interior lives and we hold the belief that looking at hard things leads somewhere worth going.
How much are you willing to do that for yourself?
I’m not talking about disclosure in session. I’m talking about your own therapy—actual, sustained, ongoing therapy, not the few sessions you completed as a training requirement. I’m talking about reflective practice, writing, supervision that challenges you rather than just logging your hours. The therapists who do the most nuanced work are usually the ones who have spent the most time with their own material.
Your self-awareness is not separate from your clinical competence. It is part of it.
The work will get inside you, and you need a plan for that.
You will hear a lot about burnout. It gets mentioned in training programs, referenced in ethics codes, cited in research on clinician wellness. What gets talked about less is how gradual and personal it is—how it doesn’t always announce itself as burnout but instead shows up as irritability, or numbness, or the quiet dread you feel on Sunday nights before a full week of sessions.
This work carries a cumulative weight. Sitting with grief, trauma, crisis, and pain—session after session, week after week—affects you. That is not a weakness. That is a human response to human material, and it has a name: vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue. These are not things that happen to clinicians who didn’t try hard enough to take care of themselves. They are occupational realities that require active, ongoing attention.
What that attention looks like will be trial and error, and it will probably look different at different points in your career. Some of it is structural—caseload size, scheduling, not booking back-to-back sessions without breaks. But a lot of it is relational. Finding colleagues who understand what this work actually asks of you, who don’t need you to explain why a particular week felt heavy. Building a community of people who respect the boundaries you set, not just tolerate them. Doing your own work on the people-pleasing tendencies that many of us brought into this field—the part that says yes when capacity is gone, that absorbs more than is yours to absorb because saying otherwise feels like failing the client.
Sustainability in this work is not a personality trait. It is a practice. And the earlier you start treating it that way, the better.
This profession runs on unpaid labor, and someone has convinced us that’s okay.
Practicum placements. Pre-licensure supervision. Volunteer hours. The years of early-career work at wages that don’t reflect the training you’ve completed—or the weight of what you’re being asked to carry.
There is a through line in helping professions, human services, care work of all kinds: the idea that doing good is payment enough. That the meaning of the work should offset the material conditions of doing it. That if you’re in it for the money, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.
I want you to notice that idea. I want you to question it. Because it has been used, often, to keep people in roles and systems that take more than they give—and to make those people feel like the problem is their own values, not the structure itself.
Private practice is a service business, and no one teaches you that.
If you want to run a private practice, you are not just a clinician. You are a business owner. You will need to know how to attract clients, how to communicate your value, how to manage your money, how to think about growth and sustainability. You will need marketing skills—and not in a gross way, but in a functional way. People need to find you.
And then there’s this: therapy is a relationship that works toward its own ending. When it goes well, clients leave. That’s the goal. Which means you will always need more clients. The churn is built into the model, and no one walks you through what to do with that—practically or emotionally.
The money part is harder than you expect, and more variable than anyone wants to admit.
This is one of the things I hear most often from newer clinicians who have recently stepped into private practice: the shock of realizing how directly your income is tied to how many clients walk through your door. There is no salary floor here. There is no guaranteed caseload. If you have five clients one week and two the next, you feel that—in your bank account and, if you’re not careful, in your sense of yourself.
Building a private practice from the ground up takes longer than the success stories suggest. It often requires financial support from somewhere else while you’re doing it—another job, a partner’s income, family help, savings. That’s not a failure condition. That’s just what it actually looks like in the early stages for most people.
The version where you open a practice and it fills up immediately exists, but it is not the norm—and treating it as the norm sets people up for a particular kind of shame when their experience looks different.
Know what you’re building toward. Know what it costs you to get there. And give yourself the honest accounting of what you have available to bridge that gap—without pretending the gap isn’t there.
The systems are not designed to be navigable, and that is not your fault.
Getting credentialed with insurance panels. Submitting your licensure application. Understanding what your licensing board actually requires and where to find that information. Figuring out who to call when the answer you received last week contradicts the answer you’re receiving now.
None of this is intuitive. Very little of it is clearly documented. And the people responsible for answering your questions are often overextended, inconsistent, or working inside systems that are themselves fragmented. You will spend time on hold. You will get conflicting information. You will complete a process you thought was finished only to discover there was a step you didn’t know about.
This is not a reflection of your competence. It is a reflection of systems that were not built with providers in mind—and certainly not with newer providers in mind.
Find colleagues who have been through it. Ask the specific questions in consultation spaces. Document everything. And try—genuinely try—not to take the bureaucratic chaos personally, even when it costs you time or money you didn’t have to spare.
No one told you that you’d have to market yourself, and you’re not sure how to feel about that.
You didn’t go into this field to build a personal brand. You went into it because you wanted to do meaningful work with people who needed it. And somewhere between graduation and private practice, you learned that wanting to help is not the same as being findable.
There is a lot of noise out there. A lot of therapist content that feels performative, oversimplified, or optimized for engagement in ways that don’t sit right with you. And you know, probably better than most, how much slop gets mistaken for substance online. You don’t want to add to that. But you also can’t reach clients who don’t know you exist.
The goal is not to be the loudest. It is to be clear—to give people enough of a genuine sense of who you are and how you work that the right ones can recognize themselves in what you’ve written.
That’s not self-promotion in the way you might have feared it. It’s more like—making yourself legible. Saying, in your own voice, this is what I offer and who I’m here for. That takes practice, and it probably feels uncomfortable before it feels natural. But it is part of the job.
“Just find your niche” is more complicated than it sounds—especially when you’re starting out.
You will hear this advice constantly: niche down, don’t be a generalist, specialize so clients know exactly what you offer. And in theory, that makes sense. A niche is a focused area of clinical specialty—a particular population, presenting concern, or therapeutic approach that you develop deep expertise in over time. Anxiety in adolescents. Grief work with older adults. Trauma-informed care for first responders. The idea is that specificity makes you more findable and more credible to the clients you’re best suited to serve.
But here’s what that advice glosses over for clinicians who are newer to the field: you may not have a niche yet, and that is okay.
What you likely have is exposure. An internship placement, a volunteer role, a practicum site—places that introduced you to specific populations because that’s where the training opportunity happened to be. And there’s real value in that experience. It is genuinely yours. But exposure is not the same as specialization, and calling it a niche before you’ve had the time and volume of clinical experience to actually develop depth there is a different thing entirely.
Give yourself permission to be broader early on. To see what kinds of clients and presenting concerns genuinely draw your attention and energy. To notice what lights you up clinically and what depletes you. That information will point you toward a niche more honestly than any branding exercise will.
The specialization will come. You don’t have to declare it before you’ve earned it.
Many therapists do more than one thing. You’ll have to decide if that’s for you.
As you enter the field, you’ll start to notice that a lot of clinicians are not doing clinical work exclusively.
Some offer supervision or consultation once they’re licensed to do so. Some speak at conferences or trainings. Some create digital products—courses, guides, templates. Some write. Some maintain another job entirely alongside their practice, either because they want to or because the income variability of private practice makes it necessary.
There is no single right answer here. For some people, multiple streams of work bring energy and financial stability. For others, the overhead of running a practice is already enough—adding more roles or revenue lines creates fragmentation that isn’t worth it. This is a deeply personal calculation, and it involves honest questions: Do you have the time and capacity for this right now? Do you have the resources—financial, relational, logistical—to build something additional without it coming at the expense of your clinical work or your own wellbeing? Are you drawn to this because it genuinely excites you, or because the financial unpredictability of practice feels scary and this feels like control?
What I’d caution against is deciding before you have enough information. Give yourself time to understand what running a practice actually asks of you before you layer more onto it.
And if you do eventually add other work—supervision, content, speaking, whatever it is—make sure it’s a choice you’re making, not a reaction to pressure you haven’t fully examined yet.
There is a real bind if you want to serve specific communities.
If your clinical aspirations are tied to reaching particular populations—communities that have historically been underserved, people with fewer resources, the clients who need care the most and can access it the least—you may find yourself navigating a genuine tension between your values and your finances.
Meeting people where they are often means sliding scale fees. It sometimes means community mental health settings with limited pay and significant administrative weight. It can mean choosing between the work you believe in and the income that makes your own life sustainable.
I don’t have a clean answer to that. I just want you to know it’s a real tension, not a personal failure—and it’s worth thinking about before you’re in the middle of it.
Do not compare your practice to what you see online.
People will sell you frameworks, templates, and masterclasses on building an out-of-network private practice. Some of that content is genuinely valuable. Listen to as much of it as you can. But understand what you’re not always seeing: the circumstances that made the path possible.
I’ll say it plainly about myself. I lived at home, rent-free, for a significant portion of my training. I have a partner whose income and benefits provided stability I could not have created alone. I had access to resources, networks, and community support that are not universally available. My path was not only a product of my effort. Effort was part of it. But it was not the whole story.
No one can guarantee you their results. Be skeptical of anyone who implies otherwise.
And there are so many skills they didn’t teach you.
How to talk to potential clients about money. How to write a Psychology Today profile that sounds like you. How to set a fee that reflects your worth without sending you into a spiral. How to handle the slow months without catastrophizing. How to build a referral network. How to take a real vacation.
These things matter. They are not less important than your clinical skills. They are the infrastructure that lets you keep doing the clinical work at all.
I told you I was going to be a bummer. I meant it.
And I also want to say this: it is not glamorous. It has never been glamorous. But it is the most meaningful thing I have dedicated my life to—and I don’t say that lightly or as a consolation prize for everything I’ve just described. I say it because it’s true, and because I think you deserve to hear both things at once.
What I have to say about this profession changes. That’s a good thing. The field is not static, and neither am I, and I hope that some of what I’ve written here eventually becomes outdated.
I hope that asking for help and receiving mental health services becomes less stigmatized. I hope insurance providers pay clinicians what the work is actually worth. I hope the rise of venture-backed platforms stops feeling like a threat to independent practitioners trying to do this work with integrity. I hope the next generation of therapists has better coursework, better financial preparation, better structural support than most of us had.
I hope I’m wrong about some of this. I genuinely do.
But until then—go in knowing. Ask the hard questions early. Find your people. Do your own work. And trust that the profession needs exactly what you have to bring to it, even on the days when that’s hard to believe.
I've shared this out to my colleagues on FB. You wrote what I've always been considering writing about after messing up my licensure process too many times. I am truly grateful for your skill to share the words that echo our own too quiet process.