Personal Route To Private Practice
/My personal route to private practice
Hey! I’m Shannon. A native Floridian who found herself moving to Kentucky for graduate school in 2014. Prior to moving, I graduated from Florida State University in 2013 with an elementary education degree and aspirations of attending graduate school and becoming a school counselor. During the research phase of various programs and graduate schools, I stumbled across the “community mental health” track that ran parallel to the school counseling track at several of the programs I was looking into.
I was immediately more drawn to this route but had a difficult time grappling with the concept of not “using” my undergraduate degree. After several hours on the computer Googling and multiple conversations with friends and family members, I decided to follow my gut and sign up for the required prerequisite undergraduate courses (since I hadn’t taken a psychology course since high school) needed to apply for the community mental health counseling tracks. After several applications were sent in and interviews were had, I landed on University of Louisville and attended their graduate program for clinical mental health counseling.
Never in a million years did I think I would live in Kentucky, and at the time I was highly motivated to move here to be near family that had recently moved to Louisville. To my surprise, I fell in love with the city very quickly and after graduation in 2016 I decided to put down some roots and I now call Louisville, Kentucky my home.
Throughout schooling I interned at various community mental health agencies and ended my internship at a local psychiatric hospital. After graduation, I was hired on at this hospital as a full-time therapist in the children’s outpatient partial hospitalization program and started racking up the direct clinical hours needed for my full licensure requirements.
About a year after graduation I received a scholarship to attend the Wayne Institute of Advanced Psychotherapy certification program where I depended my knowledge base of psychodynamic therapy and heightened my clinical expertise as a treatment provider. This year long program assisted me in doing this by collaborating with a diverse group of professionals from around the world and with an interactive learning environment with hands on experience, vivid study material and group discussions.
Another very important thing this program did for me was re-open my eyes to the world of private practice. I hadn’t thought about it in quite some time and honestly forgot that at the beginning of graduate school I wanted to open my own practice. I just never took the time to pause and see that along the way my dreams and visions for the future shifted based off fear of inconsistent pay and that shear fact that private practice was painted by my professors as something that we might get to do at the end of our times in the field but definitely not something that should be done immediately after graduation.
Anyways, back to the postgraduate work I did and how given the structure of psychodynamic therapy and its long-term components, the clients I currently had at the hospital were not always the best fit for the case consultations due to the programs short term nature. Therefore, during the program I started seeing 1-2 clients in the evenings in a colleague’s office for purposes of the program and to fully learn, digest and apply the material we were studying.
At time it I was just so caught up in life, working full time and keeping up with the course materials that I didn’t even realize that I had opened up a private practice (or “hung my own shingle” as one of my graduate professors used to always say). Though it was small and not quite structured in the ways it should have been, it was mine. I quickly learned that I LOVED the work I was doing with my private practice clients and having full autonomy (with respect to my licensing board, ha) of what was and what wasn’t part of my practice .
After the completion of the program, I decided to pick up a few more private practice clients and “legitimize” my practice with a name, business entity, website, and so forth. After my full-time gig was over, I would head to my colleagues private practice office that she let me rent by the hour and I saw a handful of private practice clients then went home. Sleep. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
After a handful of months, I noticed more and more of my thoughts were becoming consumed with private practice this private practice that. I loved the energy that this new venture was giving me. At the same time, this made me realize that the work I was doing at the hospital was not hitting me in the same way it used to. Not that the work I was doing there wasn’t meaningful or needed (because it was very much both of those) but I just knew private practice was sitting with me in a different way, and that I liked that feeling.
I am a firm believer of following your dreams (whatever they may be) and getting there in whatever fashion suits you best. For me that looked like switching from full time to PRN at the hospital after completing my supervision and receiving my full licensure and spending more of my time and energy on my private practice. During this time, I started to look for my own office and really took a deep dive into practice building. I read just about every blog I could find and listened to all of Allison Puryear and Joe Sanok’s podcast episodes on the ins and outs of building and maintaining a practice.
Even though I knew this was the path I wanted and needed to take I couldn’t help but feel that I was doing something “wrong” or that I hadn’t “paid my dues” long enough. This wasn’t because I was making the wrong decision or that the individuals around me weren’t supportive, but more so something I just felt like I “should” feel because I was doing something “out of the norm”. What I quickly realized, was that this feeling was (unfortunately) often felt by many young therapists and that its roots were ingrained deep into some larger systemic issues within our field.
Once I was able to separate myself from others and stop the comparison game, I noticed a complete shift and it wasn’t long before my entrepreneurial brain took over. This led to the idea to create a shared workspace for mental health and wellness professionals. Learn more about how that idea came to be and how I turned that dream into a reality here.
Anyways, nowadays I am a licensed professional clinical counselor in part time private practice, and the founder of b.mindful Louisville which is Louisville’s first shared workspace in Louisville, KY for mental health and wellness professionals. I split my time between the two businesses and wouldn’t have it any other way. I thank myself for having the courage to follow my dreams and I thank my friends and family for all the support, love and assistance they have thrown my way throughout this journey.
Peace and love.
XOX
Shannon
“I want clinicians to feel empowered in the work that they do so they can bring their best selves to sessions and provide for their clients in the best ways possible.”
Learn more about the shared workspace and offices of b.mindful Louisville or reach out to Shannon Gonter if you are a human helper in the greater Louisville , KY area.