It's almost the beginning of a new month with bills to be paid so let's consider money and therapy.
Therapists that I know generally do not like to talk about money and fees. Most of us came to this work out of a desire to help others -- more about that on another day. And we often become uncomfortable with the business aspects of being in practice. The training programs I am familiar with make no mention of the business aspects of practice. So most of us went into, and many continue, practice with too little knowledge of and attention to nuts and bolts issues like fees.
Greed is an issue here; greed in the sense that no matter how noble some of our motives for being a therapist are, it remains the case that it is how we earn a living. And if we don’t get paid, we don’t eat. Therapists who rely on the compassion of strangers to provide for them are most likely going to have to find a job to pay the bills. I know of only one writer who has been willing to talk about the issue of greed in psychotherapy -- Barbara Stevens Sullivan has a chapter on it in her book, Psychotherapy Grounded in the Feminine Principle. Any time I have attempted to raise the issue among clinicians, I have been met with ferocious resistance and complete disavowal of even the slightest whiff of greed as part of what we do in charging for our time.
I learned from Sullivan about the place of greed in the Tibetan Wheel of Life; greed is one of the three root delusions at the center. For therapists, denial of the importance of money and being paid can be a potent source of problems. Being unconscious about the importance of money in one's life places a person at risk of being in the grip of unconscious greed. Openly acknowledging the importance of being paid and the desire to have enough money to live well creates the opportunity to consciously think through the issues. Once I became comfortable with the fact that indeed I do not do my work out of the pure goodness of my heart and that I do enjoy being paid for what I do, the whole issue of dealing with fees became much easier.
Like many, I had felt almost guilty charging for my time. And as a consequence, for a long time, I set my fees too low and I was lax in collecting and in dealing with issues with patients about money. In fact, in my own discomfort with the whole subject, I was modelling for them that money was a somewhat taboo topic and I was unconsciously encouraging them to be as reluctant about paying me as I was to acknowledge that I wanted to be paid. My plumber seemed to have no problems letting me know what he charged for the work he did and that he expected to be paid on time. Nor did my dentist or my attorney. So step one was acknowledging that earning a living is what I am about, as much and often more than any of the noble aspects of working with people. This is a tough thing for a lot of therapists. How can I be “good” and openly embrace my desire for money?
Then comes the problem of what is enough?