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How Therapists Retire: Planning, Ethics, and Letting Go of the Work You Love – An Interview with Lynn Grodzki and Margaret Wehrenberg

Curt and Katie chat with Lynn Grodzki, LCSW-C, MCC and Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D. about retirement for therapists: how to navigate the practical, emotional, and ethical aspects of ending a therapy career. They discuss the Readiness for Retirement Model, push and pull factors, emotional attachments, legacy work, and how therapists can prepare to close a practice with integrity and self-compassion.

Transcript

Click here to scroll to the podcast transcript.

(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)

About Our Guests: Lynn A. Grodzki, LCSW-C, MCC and Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D.

Lynn A. Grodzki, LCSW-C, MCC
 Image: Lynn Grodzki - headshotLynn Grodzki is a licensed, certified clinical social worker and a master certified coach, in private practice for 30 years. As a business coach, Lynn has helped counselors, therapists and psychologists learn the practical skills, emotional mindset and psychological maturity needed to succeed in the dual endeavor of being both a psychotherapist and a small business owner.

Lynn is the author of seven books. Her best-selling Building Your Ideal Private Practice is considered the “bible” of private practice and positioned her to become a pioneer in the field of practice-building, showing tens of thousands of therapists world-wide how to reconcile profit with service, combining commerce with ethics. She has been instrumental in helping to ensure the viability of psychotherapy delivered via private practice, for a generation of practitioners.

Lynn continued to break new ground. Therapy with a Coaching Edge offers a paradigm-changing model for today’s therapists, showing them how to add the leverage and action of a coaching approach to the wisdom and purpose of psychotherapy. Her newest book, co-authored with Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D., Letting Go of the Work You Love, is, once again, an innovative resource and the first retirement roadmap for healing professionals.

Lynn sat on the faculty of a large coach-training organization for twenty years, was a past vice-president of NASW-Metro Chapter, and past-president of the Greater Washington Society of Clinical Social Work. She has been a popular presenter at therapy conferences in the US and internationally and a regular contributor to the Psychotherapy Networker Magazine.

Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D.
 Image: Margaret Wehrenberg - headshotMargaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D., is a licensed Clinical Psychologist whose five decades of work in the mental health field include her groundbreaking work on anxiety that has influenced business leaders, elected officials, the legal system, and educators around the world. Her programs on managing anxiety have helped over 50,000 clinicians to offer effective therapy for anxiety and depression to clients of all ages.

As a sought-after trainer, Margaret has taught in-person sessions throughout the United States and internationally throughout Canada and Australia, as well as in Cuba at the invitation of the Cuban Society of Health Psychology and The Federation of Cuban Women. Her training has also been offered internationally online in Greece, Italy, and China.

As an author, Dr. Wehrenberg was the first to publish books specifically for psychotherapists on the neurobiology of mental health disorders, teaching how psychotherapy can effectively “use the brain to change the brain” of anxiety and depression. Her 11 books on the treatment of anxiety and depression, published by W.W. Norton, have been translated into seven languages. She is frequently interviewed by reporters and podcasters for her expertise on anxiety and her comments have appeared most recently in The New York Times. She is a regular contributor of articles for Psychotherapy Networker magazine (print and online editions) and she blogged for Psychology Today on depression. Recently retired from clinical services, she continues to write and teach, pursuing her passion to educate psychotherapists on effective psychotherapy.

In this podcast episode: How therapists can plan for a thoughtful, ethical, and emotionally grounded retirement

Curt and Katie talk with Lynn Grodzki and Margaret Wehrenberg about preparing for retirement as a therapist, from the earliest stages of contemplation to closing a practice and finding new meaning in life after therapy. They explore how to approach this major career transition ethically and emotionally, how to identify readiness, and how to honor the legacy of a lifelong career in mental health.

Key Takeaways for Therapists on Navigating Retirement and Closing a Practice

“Next to entering the profession, retirement is the most consequential transition in a therapist’s journey, and yet we don’t know how to do this, and we’re not talking about it.” – Lynn Grodzki, LCSW-C, MCC

  • Therapists often don’t plan for retirement, leading to crises or rushed decisions.
  • Lynn and Margaret developed the Readiness for Retirement Model, adapted from the stages of change, with four stages: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, and action.
  • Early planning, sometimes a decade in advance, supports ethical and emotional endings for both therapist and clients.
  • Therapists must confront push and pull factors: things that make them want or need to retire (like fatigue, new technology, or financial stress) and things that draw them toward new opportunities (like family, travel, or new projects).
  • The emotional journey of retirement includes self-reflection, grief, guilt, and identity shifts. Therapists must separate personal needs from professional responsibilities.
  • Ethical closure includes ample notice, non-abandonment, clear communication, and secure handling of client records and intellectual property.
  • Margaret’s experience with her website domain being reused illustrates the importance of protecting professional assets when retiring.
  • Therapists should also create a professional will and plan for digital and online presence closure.
  • Legacy work helps therapists recognize the ripple effects of their impact and feel that they’ve “done enough.” 

“We want therapists to be prepared for the grief they will feel at losing—if they close their practice and close it not by attrition—that’s a lot of relationships ending simultaneously.” – Margaret Wehrenberg

Resources on Therapist Retirement, Ethics, and Legacy Planning

We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links. Please note that some of the links below may be affiliate links, so if you purchase after clicking below, we may get a little bit of cash in our pockets. We thank you in advance!

Relevant Episodes of The Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide

Meet the Hosts: Curt Widhalm & Katie Vernoy

Picture of Curt Widhalm, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcast; a nice young man with a glorious beard.Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Picture of Katie Vernoy, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcastKatie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

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Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements)

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm and Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:12
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that go on in our practices, things that go on in our lives, the ways that we go about doing things. And occasionally we talk about someday we’re going to retire and we’re going to reach the end of our career. We’ve had a couple of kind of discussions around long term preparation for that and really being able to talk more in depth about what that process might look like. We are joined by people who’ve written approximately 10,000 books between the two of them, some of which have very much informed Katie and my practices. So honored to have people that I’ve read so many of your words throughout the years. So we’re so thankful to be joined by Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg and Lynn Grodzki, LCSW, to help us talk about the retirement process. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Margaret Wehrenberg 1:15
Oh, it’s great to be here, and thanks for those kind words.

Lynn Grodzki 1:17
Thanks Curt and Katie, so nice to join you.

Katie Vernoy 1:20
We’re so excited for this conversation. I actually have a colleague. We’re going to interview her in a probably couple weeks, where she’s going through this process, and she needed your book and did not have it. And I’ve seen so many folks have such a hard time figuring out when to retire, how to retire, and I think we’ve made a joke that therapists don’t retire, we just kind of fade into the chair. And so I’m very excited about this conversation, but before I also gush too much, I would like to ask the question that we ask all our guests, which is, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

Lynn Grodzki 1:54
Well, I’ll start. I’m Lynn Grodzki, and I’m a psychotherapist that had a business background before I became a psychotherapist. So after I became a psychotherapist, I started to do some business coaching of other therapists, and eventually continued my own coach training, and had a dual practice where I worked as a psychotherapist, as a clinician, but also as a business coach for primarily for therapists, and wrote a lot of books for therapists. And Margaret and I kind of met each other at conferences, so we would be speaking, and I was a big fan of Margaret’s books, and often referred my clients to Margaret’s books. And then she told me in a conversation that she was going to retire, and I was really surprised about that, and we began to talk about her decision to retire, and about retirement in general, and then decided that we really wanted to explore this, and we started to survey other therapists. We did hundreds of surveys of other therapists, we started to teach on this, and then eventually started to write. And at this point, what I’m really excited about, and Margaret will talk about this too, is we’ve written the first guide for therapists, so about retirement. So there really wasn’t anything in the literature before this, which is kind of stunning, because, as you and Katie and Curt know, everything’s been written about therapy. I mean, there’s so much out there. We couldn’t believe that there was nothing about this.

Margaret Wehrenberg 3:31
Yeah, yeah, and I, Margaret, have been a therapist one way or another since I was 20 and graduated from college with an absolutely unusable degree in theater, and yeah, and I needed to to make a living, and I ended up as a psych tech at a residential treatment facility for children. And I just was, I was taken with therapy from that point onward. So my long career has wandered all over different kinds of specialties, but what I began to realize as a young therapist and especially when I started working a lot with addiction, which led me to work with trauma, is that I had so many clients with intense anxiety who couldn’t do the therapy work because they couldn’t manage their anxiety, and I started to develop all these ways people could work with anxiety, and then realized the reason I didn’t know anything is because therapists weren’t writing about it. This was barely, you know, Beck’s work, David Burns’ work, was just beginning. So I really started investigating that, and I wrote books for therapists on how to handle anxiety symptoms, thinking it would make whatever kind of therapy otherwise they were doing, whether they were addictions or trauma or personality disorder or whatever, that they could use these methodologies. And so my work became very pragmatic, and my practice then became half of what I did, the other half was teaching continuing education around the United States and internationally. And at this point, I’ve estimated that I’ve presented live in front of over 50,000 therapists on treating anxiety and depression, and I was starting that before the world of social media and podcasting became a possibility. So this is a little new for me to be on a podcast.

Curt Widhalm 5:24
One of the questions that we start with is not from a shaming place, but a wisdom place. If we can take what other people have done and not make the same mistakes as them, why not? So in all of these interviews and what you’ve talked about with people around retirement, what are some of the things that you’ve seen therapists get wrong identify as their regrets as they plan for retirement?

Margaret Wehrenberg 5:52
Well, I’m going to let Lynn mostly say that, but I’ll say the biggest regret is they didn’t plan and and that it comes upon them by necessity sometimes, and takes them by surprise, even at some young ages. Or it comes upon them when they suddenly have a life demand that says I can’t continue working and they’re not fully prepared. I want to let Lynn say something because, because there’s something about this that is really significant about why we wrote.

Lynn Grodzki 6:26
You know, as we started to think about the profession in general and how people leave, when they leave, we realized that, next to entering the profession, retirement is the most consequential transition in a therapist’s journey, and yet we don’t know how to do this, and we’re not talking about it. And we looked at some models to try to think about what would make sense for therapists. And we looked at the readiness for change model that many of us learned about early on, the Prochaska model, and in many ways, it felt like it was relevant. So we created a readiness for retirement model based on that those steps of change, and we now feel that these steps of readiness are key, and this is what’s going to allow a therapist to have an ethical ending and a successful ending and a compassionate ending. And those are the things that we all want when it comes time to close our practices. And you know, Curt, as you said, we’re all facing this. We’re all going to get there at some point.

Margaret Wehrenberg 7:39
And I want to add that we’ve taught some webinars on this topic, and we’ve had people all different age groups. And I was very struck by a therapist who was in her mid 40s who said, obviously, I’m not planning on retiring anytime soon, but now that I know this readiness for retirement model, I’m going to know how to follow a process that might start as soon as 10 years from now, but I’m going to be thinking about it, and we have a stage we call pre contemplation, where she’s it’s going to be in the back of her mind. How is this going to affect me? But the other thing, I think, is almost all of us have worked with therapists and other professionals in our therapy practice who are going to retire, and the information in our book is very relevant to any retirement process, even though it’s highly focused on therapists.

Katie Vernoy 8:32
What’s the readiness for retirement model? What does that look like? What does that include?

Lynn Grodzki 8:38
Well, that includes four stages, okay, and we start with pre contemplation. And many therapists know that pre contemplation stage is when you might be in some some denial. You know, I’m never going to retire. I’ve just had an 83 year old therapists say to me, I don’t need your book because I’m never going to retire. And I thought to myself, Wow, you are at some point, we all are. So this pre-contemplation is a way to build self awareness for the therapist and we, you know, in our book, “Letting Go of the Work You Love,” we map that the stages out throughout the book, The next stage is really kind of, for some therapists it’s like the meat of things, and that’s the contemplation stage, which is looking at, how do you end with your clients, and how do you prepare them and prepare yourself for what is known in the profession as a forced ending. You know, many of us, when we come in, come to start to work with a client, there’s kind of this unspoken agreement, we’ll be here as long as you need me, I’ll be your therapist as long as you need to be in therapy. So when a therapist decides to retire or to or needs to leave or needs to close down her caseload, this is not with the sanctioning of the client, who can feel a lot of upset. So those are the first two stages that I’m going to let Margaret talk about. The next two. There’s four stages. So pre contemplation, contemplation and Margaret tell us about the next two.

Margaret Wehrenberg 10:18
Then we have preparation and action. And I am kind of the model child of whatever the right word is, I’m the model for how to do this wrong because I went directly from pre-contemplation, practically to action, just vaguely doing preparation, because I had done financial preparation, but other things I hadn’t, and that’s because I didn’t have this book. I realized I had been pre in pre-contemplation for quite a long time, and I knew I would retire like, you know, sometime around 70, early 70s, that I knew that I wanted to have time for other things. But one day, I was probably 68 and 67 maybe even I was driving to work, and I said, I don’t want to do this anymore. And I will tell you for 50 years, I said, I love my job. I love everything about it. It is endlessly fascinating. And then one day, I realized I’m just tired of doing this. Which is very different than saying I’m really tired and I need a vacation. So I hurried through the preparation stage, which is really the stage where you should be thinking very deliberately about, when am I going to do this? What steps do I have to follow to ethically close my practice? How am I going to tell my clients about this? What timeline do I need to have? The only thing I did, which was quite by accident, was realized that somewhere along the line, I needed to stop taking trauma survivors, because I knew that they often have a very long trajectory in therapy. So by my mid 60s, I was not anymore taking a client that I knew that knowingly had suffered trauma because I knew I couldn’t stick with them till the end of their therapy. And so I had started preparation by saying, Who can I take as a client and who not? Now sometimes we have therapists who are not private practice therapists who are involved in agency work or running programs or supervision or teaching, and their stage of how they’re going to move out of those responsibilities, also has to be taken pretty seriously and prepared for it. So once you’ve done the preparation, I know how I’m going to do this, then the final stage is taking action. And we spent quite a lot of time talking about this. And I really especially want Lynn to spend some time talking about this, which has to do with what is it like when you start saying to people I have to say goodbye now? And how that affects you, the client, the practice and all of that. I hope I’m not leaping forward and dumping on you, Lynn there.

Lynn Grodzki 12:55
Yeah, so you know, with action, we’re doing two things. We’re in this book, we’re looking ahead at how you retire, but we’re also looking backwards to say what, what did I do, and what was purposeful, and did I leave a legacy? And what’s the new normal going to be like? And is there an identity once I’ve loosened my professional identity, which is a big thing that we talk about, what new identity might I have as I’m moving towards retirement? So there’s a lot to look at. It’s both kind of bittersweet in this stage, but also can be really exciting and like doors that open for people.

Margaret Wehrenberg 13:49
And we talk a lot about, how do you know when you should retire? And we identify what we call push factors and pull factors. So obviously, one of my push factors was saying, I’m tired of this. I need okay, but one of my pull factors was I have grandchildren, and they don’t live close to me, and I want to go spend time with them. So, I was drawn towards family needs. But there are many other push factors, and some of them as we get older, as therapists and to me, you Katie and Curt are models for this of moving into and embracing new technology and new ways of communicating. Some older therapists say that’s that’s beyond me, it’s I don’t want to learn how to do it, and so they may be pushed out by the world of social media or the different ways we need to connect, which you two are doing very effectively. But that may drive a therapist to say, I got to get out of this profession, if that’s what it requires. Others may be feeling pushed out by the changing I’ll call it social vernacular. As the culture changes, we need to know how to talk to our clients. We need to know what language they’re using. I can see on your screen, you’ve got your identifying pronouns. That speaks to how we need to be sensitive to identity of our clients and as as older clients, keeping up even on the language that people use to talk about relationships, to talk about sexual identity, about gender fluidity. If you as an older therapists are beginning to feel like your head is spinning because there’s so much more to be aware of, you may say this is pushing me out of my profession, out of my comfort zone, because I can’t be a good enough therapist if I don’t have that information readily at hand. And it is a good therapist, I think, who is aware of where their limitations are in that regard. And I don’t want to go too far off that cliff, but, but social issues and administrative issues and insurance demands and all that could could be push factors, but pull factors include your unfulfilled longings. And I thanked Lynn for that phrase, which is, what have I longed to do in my life that I never had time for. And that you start in our book, letting go of the work you love talks a lot about, what are you moving toward? And what are those factors that pull you, and how can you identify them and plan to work with them?

… 16:20
(Advertisement Break)

Katie Vernoy 16:20
One of the things that I’ve seen in the conversations about retirement, well, at first, first, let me respond to what you just said, Margaret, was, I think the pandemic was one of those pieces, right, that moving to virtual, all of the technology, the explosion in that there was a lot of folks that I think decided to retire instead of make those shifts, and I’m sure that was chaotic and pretty, pretty hot, pretty awful for them. I think there’s this other piece where there’s a lot of folks like this 83 year old you were talking about, Lynn, that was really, they’re not either wanting to retire, not able to retire, there’s a lot of folks who financially haven’t made the planning. And so there’s a lot of mixed feelings that I think come up with this. And I feel like when we talk about retirement, I think we need to talk about the tactical things, but I think the emotional journey. And so I know you talked about the push and pull factors Margaret, but I am thinking about just the emotional process through those stages, and how someone can truly assess where they are and how they can take steps forward. Because it feels like there’s so much complexity. All these therapists are different. There’s there’s so many different things going on. What is this, what is the emotional journey from pre contemplation through action?

Lynn Grodzki 17:44
This is really difficult and deep, and we want people to take their time with this, so they have time to really process through all of this, and it happens in a couple different ways. So sometimes what therapists have to do is they have to separate out who they are and what they need as a person versus what they need as a professional and what their responsibilities are professionally. And that can be really difficult. And as you say, sometimes leaving your work is a choice, but sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s something that’s forced upon you, or sometimes it’s mandatory, and sometimes it’s not, it’s not financially possible to leave, even though you’re ready to. So sometimes it’s a have to versus a want to, and there are boundaries that you have to set. And then on top of that, if you do decide that you’re cutting back or you’re leaving your practice, then you really have to think about, how do I do this clinically? And I think this is one of the most difficult things and the most valuable things that we explored a lot in this book. You know, we’re not taught how to end relationships well in our society, you know, you could probably count on a couple fingers anytime that you’ve had a significant relationship and it ended well. So for us as therapists to know how to end these significant relationships that we have with clients can be really difficult, and we can feel like we don’t know how to think about this or how to do this, and we forget how attached our clients are to us, even if we might not be attached to them. In one of our workshops, we had a therapist say, Oh, I shut down my practice. It was no big deal. And I thought to myself, I wonder what your clients would have said about that.

Katie Vernoy 19:50
Yeah.

Lynn Grodzki 19:52
Yeah, so what we decided was really useful is we looked at attachment styles in ending. And, you know, because as therapists, many of us have been trained to think about things in terms of attachment. And we could look at client, our clients, we could go through a caseload and say, What do I think is the attachment style of this client, and what it could I anticipate is likely to happen in ending, and how could I communicate that and educate this client so we could have a constructive ending? And that’s where I think a lot of light bulbs go off for therapists, is to think this could be good, this could be positive, not just for your clients, but then therapists need to think about their own attachment styles and how that’s going to play in. So there’s a lot of work you need to do first before you make the announcement to your clients about I’m leading in three months or six months or a year.

Margaret Wehrenberg 20:56
And I really want to say that we spend a lot of time in our book about what this letting go process entails for the individual therapist to be conscious of their own process while working it through with their clients, because you have to be an ethical therapist to the end, paying attention to your clients needs, even when your own need is to is to retire. Your clients still are your responsibility, and for that reason, talk a lot about and offer a lot of worksheets and questions for reflection, personal reflection about what your identity as a therapist, what your identity as a person is, and also, what do you imagine your retirement will be? And helping people to think clearly about how they will not just, oh, I want to start traveling the world. That’s pretty vague. We want them to start thinking very specifically. And we even offer an imagery guide for how to visualize qualities that you are going to prepare yourself for in your retirement before you actually retire. So there’s a lot of very pragmatic, focused questioning worksheets and that kind of stuff in the book to be able to work through this very emotional process of deciding it’s time to go. And I noticed you use the concept of a therapeutic chair. We talk about leaving your clinical chair and how to be ready to do that.

Lynn Grodzki 22:32
Yeah. So, you know, Katie as, as you asked, a lot of therapists feel guilty. You know, they feel guilty on a lot of different levels. It could be guilty because my clients didn’t ask for this, and I’m abandoning them, or guilty because the world needs therapists right now, and there’s a lot of waiting lists out there and who am I to leave? Or just guilty on a kind of a meta, global level, you know, I have skills that I’m not using. So I think of all the emotions that in our interviews and in our surveys that came up, guilt was like number one, that was making it hard for therapists to see their way clear for this and to to kind of leave that clinical chair in a good way, in a good place.

Margaret Wehrenberg 23:24
That’s that’s so important. And the second thing that took people a lot by surprise, who, and we had many people who are already in the retirement process, was the feeling of grief, and they’re unprepared to deal with the grief that they feel. We want therapists to be prepared for the grief they will feel at losing, if they if they close their practice and they close it not by attrition. That’s a lot of relationships ending simultaneously, and the feeling of grief really surprises people quite a lot. And we heard that, you know, the people who decide to retire by attrition kind of attenuate that emotional process, but also their clients are grieving. So we really focus on the emotional process in both directions.

Curt Widhalm 24:13
Just as you’re talking about this model, I’m so thankful that somebody’s doing this work. A lot of what my career has focused on, at least within the profession, has been educating the up and coming and talking about the development model of supervisees, which kind of seems to be, get to licensure and then get to supervise, and then do something for 40 years, and then it just kind of ends. So.

Lynn Grodzki 24:39
Yeah.

Curt Widhalm 24:40
Very thankful that somebody is blazing a pathway before we all run into this ourselves. A lot of what you’re talking about is therapists who have this choice to be able to end. And wondering about those therapists who feel, for whatever reason, financial pressures that they have to continue to stay on. I’ve heard from therapists before that their retirement plan is suicide because they don’t have the finances to be able to end their job. Can you speak when people are for whatever reason tied to needing to continue to work?

Lynn Grodzki 25:18
Yeah. So as you know, I’ve been a business coach for a lot of therapists, and as a profession, we are notoriously not very good at business and not very good at the business of therapy. And part of this is to recognize that, of course, you want to work as long as you can, but we don’t have an unlimited capacity. And this is another topic that Margaret and I really looked at that is not discussed in our profession, is at some point you have to make some kind of evaluation about whether or not you could still do this job. And since so many of us do it in private practice, or we do it without supervision, at certain points in our life, we’re relying on our own assessments. And we saw it was so interesting, Curt, because we just saw this article in The New York Times that was tracking this 100 year old therapist, psychotherapist, 100 years old, and she says, I can’t see and I can’t hear and I get confused and I can’t remember things. So you would think somebody would say to her, “maybe your capacity is such that this is not right anymore.” But she said, but I love doing this work, so I’m going to continue. So these are really sophisticated questions that a lot of other professions don’t come against. Because we’re a very unique profession. We’re unique in the way that we practice and in the way that we’re licensed, and the way that we kind of see our I don’t know the ethics of our profession, so it’s not just I might need to work until I die. It’s how long could I really work? And how do I plan for that, and how do I make sure financially that I’m making smart choices? So that’s what I want for all therapists, is that they get better at the business of therapy, regardless of where they’re practicing, whether it’s in an agency or whether it’s in academia or whether it’s in a group practice or a private practice.

Margaret Wehrenberg 27:31
Yeah, and the one piece I would say is that for those who don’t have the luxury of retiring now, when maybe they would like to is that it becomes very necessary, and hopefully with the help of a supervision group or a couple of peers that are honest with you, to try to balance your self care and your awareness of your own capacity against the feeling that you need to keep working, so that you are taking good enough care of yourself to provide quality care, and that you have somebody who’s helping you monitor as Lynn talked about, the capacity that you have. How many hours a week, how many hours a day can you work and still be competent? And then I also would say to take a good, hard look at Lynn’s work on how to set up a financially viable practice, because many therapists just don’t, don’t know, and they they could do better, perhaps.

Katie Vernoy 28:31
I think that’s really a good point. And I think the other element is that we can retire as therapists and not retire from the workforce. And I think there are times when that’s absolutely the opposite, where someone has therapy as their retirement career. And so I just wanted to put that in there, because I think that the work that we do is potentially challenging enough that if we don’t have the capacity to do it, and we still need to be able to make some money to live off of there might be a different job that we are more competent to do. So, so I’ll leave that there, because I think there’s some other things that we want to get to before we run out of time. But I think it is such a a really messy question to look at is, Am I ready for retirement? Can I retire? How do I do this? And I don’t know if there’s some quick do’s or don’ts of closing a practice that we can kind of get to so that folks have a little bit of a take home here for if they’re thinking, I got to do this. And they’ll, they’ll, you know, go pick up the book for the rest of the knowledge. But what are some do’s and don’ts?

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Lynn Grodzki 29:32
Well, let me talk a little bit about that. So first of all is you need to know the ethical codes that your licensure requires. And every licensure is different, state by state, and you know you need to know your code. But in general, what we do is we look at that in for general codes you can’t abandon your clients so you want. To make sure that when you decide to retire, that you are making it very clear to them, that you’re communicating, that you’re discussing with them about potential need for referrals, and that it’s transparent. So this is regardless of how you’re trained to work, whether it’s psychoanalytically or very cognitively, this is a conversation that needs to happen between you and your clients once you start to announce that you will be retiring, and you need to give your clients enough time to end as well as they can, because they’re going to have a lot of feelings and thoughts to work through. So that would be probably the biggest do, is to take your time, recognize that you need to not abandon. And then in terms of things that you might not, that you want to not do is you, you want to make sure that you have a way to store your records, that you have a way to protect your intellectual property, that you have a way to close things down, that keep you secure. And you know, Margaret had a little experience with this that I just if you’re willing to talk about it, I just felt it was a new one for us.

Margaret Wehrenberg 31:21
Yeah, it really was just very, very quickly. I had, I have an unusual name. There are not a lot of Margaret Wehrenbergs on the internet, like maybe one other one, and she’s dead. And so I decided I’m retiring. I’m not taking new clients. I don’t need my website anymore. People who know how to need to know how to reach me, know how to reach me. And so I just didn’t renew my domain name. I’d let it go. I didn’t think about it. Didn’t consult with anybody. There’s another one: consult with people. And I discovered, to my horror, a few months ago that a treatment facility acquired my domain name and is using it to advertise their services, implying, but not saying, that I am condoning it, working with them, supplying them with data. And I never thought that I had that much of a presence that somebody would use my name to ad. And I thought, I wonder, there must be a lot of therapists who have a certain amount of gravitas because of a professorship or something else. We need to consult with lawyers and or at least other professionals about how they protect their intellectual property. I just was appalled. And so now many 1000s dollars of legal fees and reinstituting a domain later, I’m sadder but wiser about about what it takes to close down. Because we are not just a person in an office. We have a presence in a community. We have a presence online. Most of us have websites, even if we are not podcasters or bloggers or something, you know, and and many people have presences on social media, Instagram and Tiktok and Facebook, etc. And we have to consult about the the requirements of how to close that down. We need to know about the ethics of how to use it, of course, but we need to know about the ethics of how to close it down, and also the wisdom of how to close it down so it doesn’t come back to bite you.

Lynn Grodzki 33:25
Yeah, and this is we, you know, we discuss about having a professional will, and you may have talked about that on your podcourse, but this is all part of that, that kind of closing down.

Katie Vernoy 33:37
We had an episode on on professional wills that will in the show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com.

Lynn Grodzki 33:43
Great.

Curt Widhalm 33:45
And your discussion with people who are starting to become curious about retirement, about ending their careers in any kind of developmental models, there’s always the people who are not quite ready for the discussion yet, but I’m curious about the people who you started to see who are maybe the furthest out from these discussions that are starting to get prepared for this? What are the youngest of the therapists that are starting to gravitate towards your workshops and your conversations?

Lynn Grodzki 34:14
Well, a lot of them are saying, Look, I won’t be ready for this for 2025, years. But you know, at least maybe this is a book that could be on my shelf, and when I do get ready, I’ll know what to do. And there’s so many things that are like that for us, just in general as human beings, right, where we just it’s good to have a guide when we’re finally ready. And I can think of so many places in my own life, even financially, where I knew that I needed to, you know, have a financial advisor, but I wasn’t ready for that. I was just starting my work, and I didn’t feel like I had enough money to bring in a financial advisor, but it was good to know what kind of questions you might want to ask of someone like that. So I think you could think of this transition as something like that, Curt, where it’s just one of those things that when you need it, it at least now there’ll be a place that you can go to for those kinds of resources and a reference for that.

Margaret Wehrenberg 35:16
And because, in our book, “Letting Go of the Work You Love,” we are so focused on the emotional process, kind of throughout even if you were a younger therapist, and you page through the book to see what’s in it, you might say, Oh, I bet my client, who is 65 might be thinking about this issue or that issue, and it might help you feel a little bit more informed. But I think Lynn is right that it’s the idea that in the pre contemplation, somewhere, way in the distant future, I’ll need this. They know that it’s, it’s in their head, kind of working someday I will retire, and when, when is it time for me to think about that more seriously? It’s one of the points we make is you may need to think seriously about retiring a decade before you actually want to do it. So we not like you’re going to start closing your practice that day, but there are things you may say, like, when I decided to stop taking trauma clients seven years before I retired, I wasn’t ready to retire, but I knew that I couldn’t stick with those people. And it’s that kind of stuff that it’s, if it’s in your mind, sort of, you can could deal with it. And I think that in our world of answers fast and we’re going to consult AI, sometimes the emotional process doesn’t go as fast as AI. You need some time to let it sit there and and develop.

Katie Vernoy 35:22
I think the thing that comes up for me when I think about this: retiring is a big deal, and it’s very emotional. There’s a lot of practical things. There’s so much going on, and it feels like there are times when people kind of equate retirement to end of life, right? There’s, there’s so much that goes, goes with that. And as you referred to earlier, this is a this is a personality job. This is a this is an identity job. Like this is what we do. We are therapists. It’s not, I’m a person that has a job as a therapist, and I go and clock in and clock out. It’s I am a therapist. And it feels like, if we look at end of life work as well, there’s, there’s a lot of focus on legacy and on how we as humans can hopefully, you know, like you’ve now done Margaret, protect, protect our our intellectual property, but also that we can protect the impact, or at least understand the impact of what we’ve done as we come to a close in this important part of our lives. And so I know that you guys have, I’m sure, covered this well in the book, but if we can, before we close up today, maybe talk a little bit about what what legacy work looks like for the professional elements of our identity.

Margaret Wehrenberg 37:54
So many of our workshop participants said it never occurred to them to think that they could evaluate their legacy, and they were so thrilled to be able to do that. So first of all, we offer some specific journaling questions and some worksheets for how to think about it. But but a quick idea is, every one of us has an impact on the people in our our personal sphere of influence. So everybody that we work with is also going to take our work and influence other people, and that a therapist in in the world of how many likes and how many followers and how many thumbs up do I get? That’s really not what we’re talking about when we talk about legacy, we’re talking about who has benefited from relationship with us. And people are stunned when they start to evaluate over the years, how many people they have had an influence on, and the ways in which that influence may ripple out into the world. So we offer some ways to think about that. Lynn, I don’t know. Do you have another comment you want to make about legacy in relation to that?

Lynn Grodzki 39:05
Well, I can just tell you that for a lot of therapists, you know, Margaret was the one who introduced this idea into the book, this idea of a legacy worksheet. And when we watch people in our workshops, and we are giving lots of workshops around on different platforms, all during the year about this book, it’s kind of remarkable to see how this affects therapists. To realize, even if I close down my practice and there’s no gold watch and only the current clients that I have know that I’m leaving to realize I can start to claim what a difference I’ve made in the world as one person. I always thought it was incredible to be an author. And you know, I live in Silver Spring Maryland, and I’m I just write out of my own little office, and that to think that you could have an impact, where people you know across the world are reading your books, it’s like, Isn’t that remarkable? But therapists do that too. Even if you’ve never written a book, even if you’ve never given a talk, you are having an impact. And I think this part of the readiness model that we do in the action stage as the last part of the model. It really helps people step away and feel like I’ve done enough.

Margaret Wehrenberg 40:31
And we focus on that phrase, I’ve done enough. And how do you get to the feeling of I am enough? It’s an important concept for sure.

Curt Widhalm 40:43
Where can people find your book? Where can they follow you find out more about all the wonderful work that you’re both doing?

Lynn Grodzki 40:52
the books. The book is published by Pesi, and it’s sold through P, E, S, I.com or it’s on Amazon, of course, and this week it’s number one in new releases in psychology and education and training on Amazon. We’re just thrilled.

Katie Vernoy 41:09
Congratulations.

Lynn Grodzki 41:11
Thank you. And we’re also doing a lot of speaking to support the book. And people could go to either one of our websites. My website is privatepracticesuccess.com and you’ll see a whole section there of the talks that we’re giving, the workshops that we’re giving, and how to register.

Margaret Wehrenberg 41:33
And my new website, my new domain name is realmargaretwehrenberg.com.

Katie Vernoy 41:42
Love that.

Margaret Wehrenberg 41:43
And of course, your books can be purchased through your local independent bookseller, and it can be purchased through Barnes and Noble. So there are a lot of different places that you could go to acquire the book. And of course, on our websites, there will be a way that you can click to buy the book as well, if you don’t go to the ubiquitous other bookseller.

Katie Vernoy 42:10
And just, just so everybody can make sure to find it really well, what’s the name of the book again?

Lynn Grodzki 42:14
So the name of the book is, is “Letting Go of the Work You Love,” and it’s a workbook. The subtitle is ‘A workbook for therapists to prepare for retirement, close a practice and end a career with integrity.’ And it was just published in August of 2025 so it’s brand new, yeah.

Curt Widhalm 42:35
And we will include links to all of those places that you can find it, and you can find that in our show notes, over at mtsgpodcast.com or on our social media. Join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, to continue on with these conversations. And until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, Lynn Grodzki and Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg.

Margaret Wehrenberg 42:59
Thank you, Curt and Katie, it’s a lovely conversation.

Lynn Grodzki 43:02
Thanks so much.

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