In the summer of 2011, after I completed six years of graduate school and internship training and was about to start my psychotherapy practice, I sat down with my clinical supervisor in the Los Angeles office we\u2019d be sharing. It had been a rigorous six years, transitioning from my role as a full-time journalist always on tight deadlines to that of a therapist whose world was broken into slow, thoughtful hours listening and trying to help people come to a deeper understanding of their lives. My supervisor went over the filing systems, billing procedures and ethical quandaries like whether to take referrals from current clients, but we never discussed how I would get these clients. I fully assumed, in what now seems like an astounding fit of na\u00c3\u00afvet\u00c3\u00a9, that I\u2019d send out an e-mail announcement and network with doctors, and to paraphrase \u201cField of Dreams,\u201d\u009d if I built it, they would come.<\/p>\n
Except that they didn\u2019t. What nobody taught me in grad school was that psychotherapy, a practice that had sustained itself for more than a century, is losing its customers. If this came as a shock to me, the American Psychological Association tried to send out warnings in a 2010 paper titled, \u201cWhere Has all the Psychotherapy Gone?….\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n