Overcoming Your Poverty Mindset

The Modern Therapist's Survival Guide with Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy

Overcoming Your Poverty Mindset

An interview with Tiffany McLain about how therapists deserve to make a good living and often do not. Curt and Katie interview Tiffany regarding her perspectives related to how sliding scale fees can perpetuate racist and classist systems, the problem with therapists sacrificing themselves and acting as saviors, and the impact you can make if you amass wealth and seek luxury.

It’s time to reimagine therapy and what it means to be a therapist. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy talk about how to approach the role of therapist in the modern age.

Interview with Tiffany McLain, LMFT

Tiffany McLain, LMFT is a therapist & consultant whose mantra is, “Full fees are the new black.” Via her program, The Lean In. MAKE BANK. Academy, she helps therapists ethically earn 30 to 50% more per month while seeing fewer clients by showing them how to think about and directly address fees in a clinically appropriate manner.

In this episode we talk about:

• Tiffany’s Lean In Make Bank Academy
• How current events are impacting therapists making money
• The belief system that we are hurting clients by charging them
• Why therapists are so susceptible to these messages
• How women and minorities are external reinforced to sacrifice ourselves
• The stigma of building wealth, living life more fully, seeking luxury
• Grappling with raising fees, with people needing help
• The internal dialogue that comes in when trying to raise fees
• How luxury has been sustained on the backs of others
• The misguided attempt to fix the system through self-sacrifice
• What the cost is when you self-sacrificing
• The problem with Saviorism
• How a sliding scale can encourage racism and classism
• Negating self-efficacy and fostering dependency, through lowering our fees
• Sliding scale = subsidizing our client’s treatment
• Tiffany’s experience with a sliding scale therapist
• How gratitude for a therapist sliding their fee can lead to clients hiding themselves, not fully showing up or engaging in treatment effectively
• The value issue related to people asking for a sliding fee or balking at paying the full fee
• How these issues may come in at the beginning of a therapist’s career
• Talking about your fee as a clinical intervention
• Unconscious dynamics that keep us from acting on what we know re: setting fees and money
• Money is a representation of the therapist’s need and desire
• Processing emotional reactions to fee changes with clients. For example: “When I raise my fees, it hurts you” without collapsing, lowering the fee, or losing boundaries
• The challenge of looking at financial capacity for individuals
• The idea that we do not have to take care of individuals who cannot afford our fee in order to create access – and ideas of how we can increase impact once we’ve had the ability to create financial stability and wealth
• The benefit to society of women gaining wealth, with the ability to make a bigger impact
• The importance of setting your fee appropriately from the beginning