You Became a Therapist to Help People, Not to Market Yourself

Most therapists I know have, at some point, sat down to write something marketing-shaped and then gotten up and made a cup of tea instead.

The discomfort is real. It doesn't come from laziness, and it doesn't come from a lack of writing ability. It comes from the fact that the language of marketing, as most of us have absorbed it, is fundamentally at odds with the language of the work. The work is quiet, slow, attentive, and built on not pushing. Marketing, as it's usually performed in our culture, is loud, fast, declarative, and built on pushing. Asking a therapist to write marketing copy is, in some real sense, asking her to put on a costume.

So the tea gets made, and the marketing doesn't get written, and the practice grows by referral or by Psychology Today or by whatever channel doesn't require putting on the costume. For some therapists, that's enough. For most, somewhere around year two or three of running a practice, the math stops working, and the question of marketing comes up again.

There's a simple, and a little hopeful, thing to say about that question.

The misunderstanding

The discomfort with marketing usually rests on a definition of marketing that doesn't match what private practice actually requires.

The cultural definition of marketing is something close to: persuading people to want something they didn't want before. That's a description of consumer advertising, which is the thing most of us are picturing when the word marketing comes up. Consumer advertising is built around manufacturing demand. It is loud because it has to be; the person on the receiving end wasn't looking for it.

Marketing for a therapy practice isn't consumer advertising. The person on the receiving end is, almost always, already looking. She has been thinking about therapy for months or years. She has typed therapist near me into her phone at the end of a long day, more than once. She isn't someone who has to be persuaded to want therapy. She is someone who has to be helped to find a therapist she trusts.

Those are different jobs, and they require different kinds of writing.

The first one is the kind of marketing therapists are right to dislike. The second one is the kind that fits, almost without modification, into the ethical and aesthetic frame of clinical work. It is descriptive, not declarative. It centers the prospective client, not the practitioner. And it sounds like the same person who shows up in session.

What it actually looks like

The version of marketing that fits inside private practice has a small number of moving parts.

It looks like a Google Business Profile that's current, with real photos and a description written like a note to a referring colleague. It looks like a one-page website that says, in plain language, who you work with, what the sessions are like, and how to schedule one. It looks like a Psychology Today profile that doesn't read like every other Psychology Today profile. It looks like a small, quiet rhythm of being present in the public-facing record of your practice, so the person searching for someone like you can find someone like you.

That is the whole thing. There's no funnel. There are no calls to action with exclamation points. There's no urgency. There's no influencer content.

What there is, mostly, is the same kind of writing you'd do if a colleague called and asked you to describe your practice for a referral letter. Specific. Honest. Trustworthy. Not promotional. Not performative.

If you can write a referral letter, you can write the entirety of the marketing your practice needs.

The thing you're actually being asked to do

The reframe that landed for me, after I had spent a year refusing to do any marketing for my own practice, was this. Marketing for private practice isn't self-promotion. It's the small ongoing labor of letting people who need your specific work know that your specific work exists.

That isn't the same thing as putting on a costume. It's closer to being clearly visible at the place where you already are.

A friend of mine, who's a luthier, builds violins by hand. He doesn't advertise. He keeps a small website, with a clear list of the work he does and a few photos of the shop. People who want a hand-built violin find him. He isn't chasing anyone. He is just available to be found.

That, more than anything else, is the right mental model for therapist marketing. You're not chasing anyone. You are being clearly visible in the small set of places where the people who would benefit from your work are already looking.

Permission

If marketing has felt impossible because the version of marketing you were imagining didn't fit who you are or what you trained for, that's a fair thing to have struggled with. The version of marketing that does fit is smaller, quieter, and more honest than what we have been told marketing has to look like.

It is also more effective, for this profession, than the loud version. The loud version triggers exactly the same wariness in prospective clients that it triggers in you. The quiet, specific, honest version, the version that sounds like the actual person doing the actual work, is the one that earns trust at the speed therapy actually moves at.

You did become a therapist to help people. The piece of marketing that helps you do that, the small public record of your practice, kept current and honest, is part of the work. It's the door. Tending the door isn't the same as standing on the porch shouting.

You can keep the door open, and you can keep the costume in the closet.

That's what good marketing for private practice looks like. It's what most of the therapists I admire actually do. And it's small enough, and ordinary enough, that anyone who can write a paragraph about a client they're referring out can do it for themselves.

Ariadne writes the small, quiet, ongoing pieces of marketing for therapists in private practice, weekly Google Business Profile posts, social posts, referral emails, in your voice. If you have been avoiding the door because the door felt like the costume, start your free week and see what tending the door looks like when it's actually written like you.