When Professional Development Becomes a Financial Treadmill

Lately, I’ve found myself circling back to the same question, almost obsessively: what has happened to the world of therapy training, and why does it feel so much like a never-ending treadmill? I write about this often, and every time I hit 'post,' I can’t help but worry that I’m being too dramatic. But I’m learning to shut out those old, patriarchal voices that want me to shrink my concerns, and instead, I’m choosing to stand by my observations.

And lately, I know I’m not the only one thinking about it because several colleagues have reached out asking where my blog posts are. They’ve told me these are some of the only places they feel “seen” in the pain they are experiencing that, unfortunately, has become pretty normalized in our field.

If you spend any time in therapist communities, you can almost feel the groupthink settle in like a heavy fog. There is this unspoken code—work hard, never complain, and above all, keep advancing. It’s as if we’re all in on a secret, even when that secret is quietly burning us out.

We normalize working back-to-back sessions without real breaks. We brag about our caseloads. We reward one another for burning ourselves out until Saturday and then call it dedication.

Amid all this hustle, something quiet but relentless has taken root: the constant, creeping sense that we’re never quite done learning. There’s always another technique, another modality, another seminar that promises to make us better, more effective, more worthy. The finish line keeps moving just out of reach.

Now, allow me to be very clear: I believe therapists need to keep learning.

I hope my doctors keep learning, so I hold us to the same standard. These are people's lives, emotions, and families we are holding in our hands at times when they are too vulnerable to manage it all themselves. We need to be trained. We need to improve. We need to be curious. We need to be willing to change our thinking when we learn something new.

And yes, if you advertise yourself as a couples therapist, you should know how to do couples therapy. If you are going to treat complex trauma, you need appropriate training and supervision. If something is outside your scope, you need to know that and refer out.

I have a much bigger problem with a system that takes a newly graduated therapist, puts them in a giant practice, builds their Psychology Today profile for them, and suddenly they are advertising themselves as an expert in trauma, couples, LGBTQ+ clients, Sex Therapy and everything else under the sun because the practice needs clients to fill their schedule.

We would never do this with a physician. You wouldn't send a brand-new doctor alone to someone with a rare autoimmune disease simply because the doctor has an interest in that population.

But we do versions of this all the time in mental health. So yes, keep learning. But let's talk about what that learning is costing us.

It starts out simple enough: you finish graduate school, get your license, and dutifully check off your continuing education credits. You discover a modality that sparks your curiosity—EMDR, IFS, DBT, Somatic Experiencing, Gottman, or something else entirely—and you dive in, often spending thousands of dollars to get trained. But before you’ve even had a chance to integrate what you’ve learned, there’s talk of the next level. The advanced training. The master class. The specialty track. The consultation group. The retreat. The certification after the certification. The treadmill speeds up, and suddenly, you’re sprinting to keep up.

And suddenly you're spending another $5,000 or $10,000 because somewhere along the way you have started believing that if you were really good at this work, you would know more.

I hear this constantly from clinicians I supervise. They feel behind. They aren't specialized enough. They aren't trauma-informed enough. They don't know enough about the nervous system, attachment, dissociation, neurodivergence, IFS, somatic work, couples work, grief, whatever the newest acronym happens to be. They believe that if they could get one more certification, they would finally feel like a real therapist. Except there is always another certification. And here is the uncomfortable part: many of the people selling those certifications are therapists themselves. I don't blame them for wanting to make money.

We all deserve a pay bump. In fact, we desperately need one.

A 2026 peer-reviewed study of private-practice mental-health providers found that Medicare reimbursement for a 45-minute psychotherapy session increased only 2.5% between 2001 and 2024, while inflation rose roughly 75%. That's not a raise. That's a massive real-dollar pay cut.

So I understand why therapists are trying to diversify their income. I understand why someone exhausted from seeing 25 clients a week starts teaching trainings, offering consultations, or doing supervision.

But we've created an ecosystem where so much of our money gets passed around inside the profession itself.

And then we go back to our practices and try to earn enough from clients and insurance companies to pay for all of it. PLUS our actual bills. And maybe, if we are really lucky, a mini vacation.

Of course, that mini vacation usually means coming back and cramming seven or eight clients into a row to “make up” for the time we had the audacity to take off.

I am writing this article after having a complete hip replacement. I tried my best to get short-term disability, but in the end, I couldn’t. And that is another part of the completely fucked-up medical system we live in, where the actual poor and disabled are often bled for even more money they don’t have so that billionaires can keep playing golf—a mini vacation they can frequently write off as a business meeting.

And then?

We go right back to the circle.

Sometimes I picture us all standing in a circle, each of us clutching the same $100 bill, passing it from hand to hand as we pay for trainings, consultations, and certifications. The money never really leaves the room—it just changes hands, over and over, in an endless loop.

Not everyone is starting from the same place. This part matters. There is an assumption that if someone really wants a training badly enough, they will “find a way” to pay for it. A colleague even showed me the credit cards she applied for to afford training. She told me, “If you charge enough, you get airline points, so that helps with the hotels and flights for more trainings.”

I understood the logic.

But you're still in debt.

And if you're waiting months for insurance companies to pay you for sessions you've already provided, that debt doesn't exactly disappear.

It becomes a debt cyclone, sucking in everything nearby—your savings, your sense of security, even your confidence that you’re doing the right thing by investing in yourself. The spin is dizzying, and it’s hard to know how or when you’ll find solid ground.

We also don't all have the same financial lives.

Some therapists have partners who can help carry the financial load. Some are single parents. Some are sole breadwinners. Some are supporting aging parents. Some are caregivers. Some are carrying enormous student loans. Some are paying extraordinary healthcare costs.

Some of us have children with significant medical or educational needs that come with expenses other families don't have.

I'm willing to say this personally because it matters.

I am a parent of a child with medical needs, and that comes with an invisible financial cost. Medical care, specialists, equipment, travel, unexpected expenses, days off (for me unpaid) due to emergencies—the list goes on. I'm also the person in my household who needs to make more money, and I run my own practice while managing my own medical needs and helping care for my family.

So when someone tells me to “just invest in yourself” and spend another $5,000 on a training, that is not a neutral financial decision.

For someone else, maybe it is.

For me, it might mean something doesn't get paid.

That doesn't make my hardship more important than someone else's. And I am absolutely not interested in comparing suffering. As a trauma therapist, I would never tell a client their trauma matters less because someone else experienced something “worse.”

Pain isn't a competition. Financial hardship isn't a competition either.

But our professional organizations and training programs need to acknowledge that therapists have very different financial realities.

And I think we need to talk more openly about financial trauma within our own profession.

There is something uniquely painful about having back-to-back therapy sessions all month and still worrying about whether you can pay your bills.

There’s a kind of shame that creeps in when you’re working as hard as you can, doing everything right, and still struggling to make ends meet. It’s not the kind of shame we talk about openly, even among colleagues. Instead, it sits in the background, coloring our experience of the work.

There is secrecy.

There are spreadsheets and calculators and moving money from one account to another and hoping nothing unexpected happens this month.

And then there are insurance clawbacks.

That’s usually the moment when I abandon all pretense of self-control and queue up hours of mindless reality TV, eating my way through an entire bag of chips. It’s almost a ritual—my small rebellion against a system that keeps asking for more when there’s nothing left to give.

Because what else are you supposed to do?

And then, on top of all of that, we have scholarship systems that sometimes require clinicians to explain exactly how badly they are struggling.

I understand why organizations do this. There are limited scholarship funds. Someone has to decide who receives them.

But I think we need to ask what it costs someone emotionally to prove that they are poor enough to deserve access repeatedly.

We are a profession that talks constantly about trauma-informed care, and yet sometimes we ask financially vulnerable clinicians to reopen their own wounds to receive help.

There has to be a better way.

Why don't more trainings offer meaningful tiered pricing?

Full price for people who can comfortably afford it. A middle tier for people who are financially stretched. A genuinely accessible tier for early-career clinicians or clinicians in difficult financial circumstances. Payment plans that don't involve predatory financing. Scholarships that don't require someone to hand over their entire financial and personal history.

People who can afford the full price could even help subsidize someone else's training without that person having to explain their trauma to a committee.

We are creative people.

We can figure this out.

But we're also looking in the wrong direction.

The answer isn't that therapists need to become more and more specialized.

Maybe the answer is that therapists need to be paid appropriately for the work they are already doing.

Insurance companies need to pay sustainable rates. Clients who can afford private pay should be able to pay rates that reflect the education, experience, emotional labor, and responsibility involved in this work. And clients who cannot afford those rates deserve a healthcare system that doesn't require individual therapists to personally absorb the cost of making mental healthcare accessible.

That is the part that keeps getting lost.

We keep telling therapists:

Get trained.

Get certified.

Get supervision.

Get consultation.

Learn another modality.

Become trauma-informed.

Become culturally responsive.

Learn attachment.

Learn the nervous system.

Learn dissociation.

Learn neurodivergence.

Learn whatever new thing showed up this year.

And yes.

Learn.

But who is paying for all of this?

And perhaps more importantly, who is paying us for everything we already know?

I have spent years becoming a therapist. I have spent years sitting with actual human beings through trauma, grief, rage, terror, shame, dissociation, loss, and all of the complicated things that happen when someone trusts another person enough to tell the truth.

That experience matters.

My education matters. My supervision matters. My trainings matter.

But so does the accumulated wisdom that comes from actually doing this work.

And in our relentless pursuit of the next certification, the next credential, the next piece of paper to prove our worth, we often overlook the expertise we’ve already built. We forget to honor the years spent sitting with real human beings, through real pain, doing the quiet, steady work that no certificate can measure.

Therapists are particularly vulnerable to this because we are trained to question ourselves.

We look for our blind spots.

We examine our countertransference.

We wonder what we're missing.

Those are incredibly important clinical skills.

But they also make us excellent consumers.

Tell a therapist, “There is something else you might be missing,” and many of us immediately start wondering if we need to buy it.

That next training will be transformative.

It might be.

I've taken trainings that fundamentally changed the way I practice.

I love learning. I love being taught by people who know what I don't. Some of the best money I've ever spent professionally has been on education.

But I also want therapists to be able to say:

This is enough for me right now.

I know how to help people.

I know how to sit with complexity.

I know when something is outside my scope.

I know when to refer.

I know when I need consultation.

I know when I need to learn something new.

And I shouldn't have to keep buying another credential to justify the decades of education and experience I already have.

Because therapists aren't the enemy.

Trainers aren't the enemy.

Consultants aren't the enemy.

Private practitioners aren't the enemy.

Clients aren't the enemy.

We are all operating inside a system that doesn't adequately value mental healthcare.

So instead of fighting each other over the money in this profession, we should start asking why there isn't more money coming into it in the first place.

Why aren't insurance reimbursement rates keeping up with the cost of providing care?

Why are highly educated, licensed mental health professionals carrying enormous student debt while being reimbursed at rates that make sustainable practice so difficult?

Why does accessibility so often depend on a therapist being willing to make financial sacrifices?

And why are we telling therapists to spend thousands of dollars to become “better” while also making it hard for them to earn a sustainable living doing the work they are already qualified to do?

The solution isn't another certification.

It could be a different economic model.

One where therapists can earn a livable wage without constantly monetizing another therapist's insecurity.

One where trainers can earn a good living without convincing every therapist that they desperately need the next level.

One where clinicians pursue education because they are genuinely interested in learning, not because they are terrified everyone else is getting ahead of them.

One where single parents and sole breadwinners aren't automatically priced out of professional development.

One where parents caring for children with significant medical needs aren't forced to choose between a valuable training and an unexpected medical bill.

And one where the people who actually control the money in healthcare—insurance companies, healthcare systems, employers, and policymakers—are held accountable for adequately funding the care they claim to value.

Because I don't want to stop learning.

I don't want anyone else to stop teaching.

I want us to stop pretending that the answer to an underfunded mental health system is for therapists to keep paying each other more money.

Maybe we're not supposed to be fighting over the crumbs.

Maybe we're supposed to be asking why there aren't more crumbs.

And maybe the most radical professional development we could do right now is stop asking ourselves,

What else do I need to buy to be good enough?

and start asking,

What would it look like if this profession actually valued the work we already do?