HHW Therapists 55 - Stop Charging Your Worth, Start Charging Your Needs

And then again, I came up in one of the presentations on money mindset today is this aspect of charge your worth, right? We hear that a lot.

If you are a therapist, if you are, whether you're a graduate student, I know I've got some graduate students listening to this.

Hello, you are so welcome.

I am so glad that there are people who are being intentional, thinking about, um, you know, essentially what's going to come after grad school.

Cause I definitely wasn't thinking about that.

So whether you are a graduate student, whether you're early in private practice, whether you've been in practice for a while, you have probably seen if you are in one of the, I think it happens a lot more in therapist, Facebook groups than it does in like on Instagram.

For example, I've still seen some things on Instagram about it in terms of like charge your worth, charge your worth.

And I get where that is coming from, like truly and genuinely, it has a really good intent, I think, of, you know, you want to charge the number that reflects your value in terms of your years of education and your certifications and all of those different things.

But charge your worth is such a complicated thing.

piece of advice or guidance or whatever you want to call it, because number one, most therapists I know have complex trauma.

And so we already struggle with, am I worthy? Am I valuable? Am I enough? I know that's a lot.

of what went into my thinking about setting my fee.

I was like, I'll price myself against my competitors and I hope other people will see it's worth it.

But I was never really thinking about it in terms of charge my worth.

Number one, because I had that piece of complex trauma that I'm trying to recover and work through.

But number two, because I never really saw it as Charity Majorson, Ph.D.: charge my worth like yes, I am a licensed psychologist no I do not think that makes me any more worthy than a master's level clinician I say all the time, I honestly think there are a lot of masters level clinicians.

that are way better therapists than a lot of, especially PhD level psychologists that I know, and I think a lot of others agree with me on this aspect of, I spent so much time in graduate school learning about how to read and interpret papers and to look at data and research and things like that.

And that specifically doesn't

make me a better therapist

compared to the therapist who instead got more classes on working with kids, working with teens, working with specific diagnoses or presentations.

I obviously got a lot of clinical practicum education, but my clinical focused classes, they were different.

And so I never inherently came out of my university counseling job and was like, I am more worthy than someone's I'm going to charge this high rate, I was like, no, I am leaving my job.

I'm leaving my job permanently because of burnout, because I don't feel valued in the way that I want to feel valued and seen and appreciated.

And so I need to charge what I need to make to earn a living, right? Like that was, I didn't, these days I do consider myself more business minded, but that wasn't how I was thinking for let's call it four and a half years ago at this point.

Uh, it wasn't like me just being business savvy.