Can You Ever Charge Too Much for Therapy?
A look at pricing, mindset, and the quiet guilt nobody admits to.
There’s a particular kind of silence that happens when a new client asks what you charge.
You know your fee. You’ve said it a hundred times.
And still, for half a second, your stomach drops.
Will they think it’s too much?
Will they say it out loud?
Will they decide, right there, that you’re not worth it?
You spend your days holding people through the worst weeks of their lives. You’re calm, attuned, endlessly capable in the room.
Then someone asks about money and a different part of your brain takes over entirely. The one that learned, somewhere along the way, that wanting to be paid well is a bit grasping. A bit un-therapist.
Nobody really talks about this.
Your training taught you the work. It did not teach you how to say “ninety pounds” without your voice doing something strange at the end.
So most of us land on the same question, usually at about 3 am: Am I charging too much?
I want to gently suggest that’s almost never the real question.
Because the thing standing between you and a fee you can say with a straight face is rarely the market, or the economy, or what the therapist down the road charges.
It’s internal. Nearly always - here’s a post about how I managed my last increase
