Amanda Butler Counseling
1. What's your practice focus and who are your typical patients?
My practice is focused on a depth psychological approach to addressing mental health issues. Depth or Jungian psychology places an emphasis on making unconscious processes conscious. This can include things like working with dreams or creating art to explore the images that are present in the unconscious. Integrating this approach with talk therapy can lead to powerful shifts in the relationships clients have with themselves and others. My typical clients are adults who are experiencing depression, anxiety, trauma, relationship difficulties, career issues, difficulties related to faith and spirituality issues, grief and loss, meaning and identity issues, career issues, women-specific issues, and psychological aspects of health challenges. I work with both individuals and couples.
2. Tell us about yourself.
I've had an interest in psychology for as long as I can remember. When I was 15, I checked a book on working with dreams out from the library and started writing down and analyzing my dreams, but I didn't really consider a career as a therapist until I was 35, and after struggling to find meaning in other career fields. I first considered becoming a therapist when I fell in love with a man who is a therapist in private practice himself. When I met him, I felt very stuck--I was miserable in the career I had at the time, but I couldn't see a way to change things. I felt too old to go back to school again and had no confidence that I could make it as a business owner.
While the relationship did not turn out the way I'd hoped, it did seem to be pointing me in a new direction that I hadn't considered. Starting over in a new career field later in life was challenging, but knowing that someone else had done it successfully made it feel more manageable. I learned how important our relationships with others can be in reflecting things back to us about ourselves and our own lives, and this is one of my guiding philosophies in my work with clients.
I'm motivated by helping others to heal from trauma and other difficulties they have experienced and in the process, helping them to connect with their authenticity and wholeness. If more of us could approach life from a space of feeling whole and interacting with the world in authentic ways and doing what we find truly meaningful, I feel like the world would be a much more pleasant place to be.
3. Tell us the story of a patient who you are most proud of helping.
I have worked for about two years with a young man who is on the autism spectrum. When he started therapy he was still in high school and struggling with his classwork and even more so with the social aspects. His family didn't understand the sensory, social, and information processing difficulties he was facing and his parents were often upset with him for the ways he was different from other people his age. He saw himself as a "problem" and felt that there was something wrong with him because he struggled to understand and connect with others. One of his interests is writing and he often brought stories he was working on to session so we could talk about them. In my work with him I used his creative work and stories by his favorite authors as a way to look at and begin understanding social interactions, as well as to help build self-confidence and self-worth. This, along with getting a formal diagnosis and accommodations seems to have been helpful. He is now in college, where he is doing well in his classes and enjoying them, as well as becoming more open to connecting with other people and making friends..
4. What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a practitioner in private practice?
For me the hardest thing has been making the transition from being an employee at a group practice run by someone else to starting and becoming established in my own private practice. For financial reasons, I couldn't just quit where I'd been working previously, so I had to get my practice up and running while also working at my other job. This created a lot of difficulty with scheduling clients because many of the most desirable appointment times were already scheduled at my job, meaning they were not available to clients in my private practice. Figuring out scheduling, as well as maintaining work life balance while basically having two full time jobs has been difficult.
5. What are the top 3 tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a private practice today?\
If you know you want to be in private practice at some point, start planning for that and setting yourself up for it as soon as you can. Even while I was in school studying to be a therapist, I knew that having my own private practice was the right path for me, so I did my best to learn all I could from professors and supervisors about what works and what doesn't. I also set up a website, Psychology Today profile, and social media for myself as a therapist so they would be established and ready to go as soon as I was independently licensed and able to set up a private practice.
Learn about what is required to start your own business, especially any requirements your state or other local area has. It's important to know what business licenses you'll need, what type of business structure will work for you, and the steps you'll need to take to get everything set up. This can be done though online research, talking to others in the industry, and in some areas there may be free or low cost programs to help aspiring business owners learn about the process of starting a business.
Remember the reasons why you went into the mental health field and want to have your own private practice. There are aspects of it that can be challenging and without holding onto the "why" the challenges can start to feel overwhelming. Remind yourself what's important and meaningful to you about assisting others with their mental health and what matters to you about doing that in the context of running your own business.