Interpersonal Branding: Therapist Marketing That Aligns With Who You Are: An interview with Carrie Wiita
Curt and Katie chat with Carrie Wiita about authenticity, first impressions, and why traditional business coaching doesn’t work for most therapists. Carrie critiques traditional business coaching models that rely on anecdotal “success stories” and mindset hype, and instead offers a relational, thoughtful, and research-informed framework to help therapists show up in alignment with their professional identities. We also explore the unique challenges therapists from marginalized communities face in marketing, and how systemic issues influence visibility and access.
Click here to scroll to the podcast transcript.Transcript
(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)
An Interview with Carrie Wiita
Carrie Wiita is a consultant, author, speaker, former professional actor, and co-host of the “Very Bad Therapy” podcast with Ben Fineman. She wrote her master’s thesis on the intersection of marketing and psychotherapy and created Interpersonal Branding—the first marketing framework specifically for service providers.
In this podcast episode, we talk about how therapists can market themselves ethically, authentically, and effectively
Marketing for therapists doesn’t have to feel slimy, manipulative, or one-size-fits-all. Carrie Wiita, a marketing therapist and creator of interpersonal branding, shares how therapists can use their natural strengths, values, and clinical insights to build trust through marketing—without pretending to be someone they’re not.
What is Interpersonal Branding for Therapists?
- A relational, client-centered approach to therapist marketing
- Why “you are your brand” can feel icky—and how to redefine that
- Moving away from generic marketing scripts and into self-reflection
“Marketing is clinical in that it sets the foundation for the therapeutic relationship, and it allows you to optimize and leverage the relationship, client expectations for therapy and client preferences for therapy.” – Carrie Wiita
The Problem with Traditional Business Coaching for Therapists
- Why common business advice often doesn’t apply to therapists
- The dangers of overemphasizing “mindset” without research or nuance
- How systemic inequalities impact access and visibility in private practice
The Impact of First Impressions on the Therapeutic Relationship
- Marketing as the beginning of the therapy process
- How clients form impressions (and expectations) before they ever call you
- Aligning your marketing with your therapeutic style and identity
Navigating Identity and Professional Boundaries as a Therapist
- Understanding context collapse in the digital age
- Authenticity vs. over-disclosure—where’s the line?
- The ongoing, iterative process of building your interpersonal brand
Marketing and Systemic Oppression with the Therapist Profession
- The challenges of visibility and self-promotion for marginalized therapists
- Why therapists should question traditional marketing norms
- How to create a professional identity that works for you and your clients
“We get told that marketing is selling ourselves and it genuinely is selling a relationship with you.” – Carrie Wiita
Resources for Modern Therapists mentioned in this Podcast Episode:
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!
Carrie’s website: www.interpersonalbranding.com
Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast:
Unlearning Very Bad Therapy An Interview with Carrie Wiita and Ben Fineman
Why Do Therapists Feel They NEED to be Coaches? – An Interview with Jo Muirhead
Clinical Marketing, An interview with Katie Read, LMFT
Does Your Social Media Make You Look Like a Bad Therapist?
What if You Hate Private Practice?
How Much is Too Much? Thoughts on therapists being too branded, niched, and political
Topic: Marketing and Branding
Who we are:
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
Katie 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
A Quick Note:
Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.
Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.
Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement:
Consultation services with Curt Widhalm or Katie Vernoy:
Connect with the Modern Therapist Community:
Our Facebook Group – The Modern Therapists Group
Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:
Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/
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 things that we do in our profession, the things that go on in our lives, the ways that we go about doing our business and handling things as a professional. And this has been kind of an unspoken role that Katie and I have tried to follow for the last couple of years. Now, I’m just blatantly speaking it out loud.
Katie Vernoy 0:12
You’re letting our secrets out.
Curt Widhalm 0:17
I’m letting our secrets out. There are plenty of podcasts out there about how to run your therapy practice and do your business things, and Katie and I have talked about it, as far as Curt and Katie knowledge on this stuff before, but we’vekind of…
Katie Vernoy 0:53
We’ve had some business coaches here and there.
Curt Widhalm 0:56
But we have largely said no more business coaches on our podcasts. And we have our very good friend Carrie Wiita, and she has such a cool idea and a cool way of approaching this that we have said, All right, we are unshuning business coaches. For one episode, we’re gonna have Carrie come over. So thank you so much for joining us, Carrie.
Carrie Wiita 1:21
Thank you so much for breaking your rule. I do think I might challenge that description. I don’t think I would call myself a business coach.
Katie Vernoy 1:29
Oh, thank goodness.
Curt Widhalm 1:31
Yes.
Katie Vernoy 1:32
We’re not breaking the rule then.
Carrie Wiita 1:33
You’re not. You’re not at all.
Curt Widhalm 1:36
Reshuning business coaches.
Katie Vernoy 1:37
All right. All right. Well, we want to get you a proper intro. So to begin with, we’re gonna have you answer the question that we’ve sent to all of our guests that come on, who are you and what are you putting out into the world?
Carrie Wiita 1:49
It’s so exciting to get this question because I have listened to your podcast since, like, I got accepted into therapy grad school. It’s so fun to be here in this capacity. So my name is Carrie Wiita, and you may know me previously from the Very Bad Therapy podcast that I co-hosted for a while there with Ben Fineman. But now I, not a business coach. I like to call myself a marketing therapist for therapists. In my master’s program, I did my thesis on the intersection of marketing and psychotherapy, and I created a marketing and professional identity development framework for therapists called interpersonal branding. So that’s what I teach now.
Katie Vernoy 2:33
Still sounds like business coaching, but we’ll let it go.
Carrie Wiita 2:35
I know. No I, that’s fair. It’s fair. It’s a fair assumption. I totally get why it sounds that way, maybe by the end of this, we’ll have challenged it. I just know that I heard, I’m pretty sure it was Jo Muirhead on your show, talking about, like, people who call themselves coaches, but like, aren’t. And I know that I personally have a hard enough time keeping my own life on the rails that I don’t like, you know, put myself out there as having the ability to do that for anyone else. So that’s not what I do.
Katie Vernoy 3:06
Got it?
Carrie Wiita 3:06
What I do is different.
Katie Vernoy 3:09
And we’ll link to that episode with Jo over on our show notes at mtsdpodcast.com.
Curt Widhalm 3:14
So you listen to us, you know that we start a lot of our episodes with what do coaches get wrong about marketing for therapists. You wouldn’t be distancing yourself from being a therapy business coach, at least to this level, if you weren’t thinking they’re doing something kind of wrong.
Katie Vernoy 3:32
Yeah, we’re not worried about shaming them at this point. We just want to know what therapists need to know about bad marketing coaches.
Carrie Wiita 3:38
Yeah, yeah. I get it. I get it. That’s why I got into this, like, that’s why this interested me in the first place, because there was something about the way our field kind of deals with marketing that just rubbed me the wrong way. I’m not gonna say that. I think that other marketing coaches or business coaches in the field are quote, unquote doing it wrong. Because obviously it worked for them, and it does work for some people. It’s honestly, it’s just like therapy in that way. You know, there are therapy approaches that some therapists swear by, because it worked for them, they got EMDR, and now they’re all in, right? But then it doesn’t work for other people, and so that is kind of what I started to kind of really react against, was a lot of what comes out from business coaches is, this is the way it is. This is the right way to do marketing. Which at first I bought in. Like, I was, like, that’s amazing. It sounds so simple, and it’s such a great sound bite. And where did they get this? Like, how did they come by this? And and where’s the research that says this is the right way to do it? And the more I dug, the more I realized, oh no, there isn’t any research about what marketing works in our field, specifically, either for clients or for therapists. There is only anecdotal experience evidence. And that is what a lot of marketing coaches teach, is what worked for them, which is great until it doesn’t work for you. What also bothers me is that a lot of what is communicated by these coaches, and again, like, I keep saying these coaches like, I’m you said I don’t mean that. I don’t mean it like that. This is really more of a plea towards therapists who have listened to a lot of these podcasts or messages and are getting down on themselves because, like, it doesn’t work for them, or they still hate marketing. Whatever. This is for you. What they’re not sharing is that a lot of what they are kind of putting out there as the way it is done, the way it should be, what you should be doing is what I call trickle down marketing. These are business and marketing practices that come to us from other fields. They’re long established, have been around forever, in many cases, have become a little bit outdated, and they’re just getting around us because our field doesn’t care at all about marketing. We just have a really conflicted relationship with it. In many respects, our field actively disdains marketing for a lot of reasons.
Katie Vernoy 6:13
I would say, repulsed.
Carrie Wiita 6:14
Repulsed. Yes, yes. And honestly, that experience is encouraged. So a lot of the trickle down marketing that we get from these coaches was never intended for us. It was intended for e-commerce, online business marketing, side hustles, that kind of thing. And it does fit sometimes, in many ways, often, because a lot of the advice has to do with like, niching down, that kind of thing. And it feels like it’s a good fit, because we as therapists already kind of slice and dice our consumers in that way, by population or by diagnosis. And so it feels like such a good fit until you try to do it, and then you get really frustrated. Another thing that I think there’s an over emphasis on, again, it’s not like that it’s wrong, but there’s an over emphasis on is the mindset work. I feel like, what I see is a lot of marketing coaches and business coaches will tell people that if you are feeling like embarrassed about putting yourself out there, if it feels icky, then you are dealing with imposter syndrome, right? Or if you are kind of resisting raising your rates, then you have money mindset issues, right? And again, it’s the same thing like that probably is a fit for some people. There are definitely some folks who identify with those explanations, but I think there are others who don’t. And again, for me, it’s just like therapy. It feels very much like a CBT approach to say, you know, you’re having this experience, there’s something wrong, there’s a problem, it’s your mindset, it’s how you’re thinking about it. You just need to reframe, right, reframe how you’re thinking about it. And again, works for some people. CBT, evidence based, 1000s of people. Millions of people love it. Me, personally, more of a post modern narrative girl at heart. And so like, for me, I start thinking, Ah, like, really, we all just have like, mindset issues. We all just, like, feel imposter syndrome, and I don’t have any money mindset issues. I have no problem charging a fee. But I can absolutely relate to this feeling of like there’s something icky about it, putting yourself out there charging money for this work. So that is a lot of the research that I looked into was, Why do we feel this way? Are there systemic, deeper things at play? And there are, there are so many. There are so many reasons why therapists hate marketing and feel icky about it, and so sure it may be your mindset, but it’s not always. So that’s that’s where I kind of differ, or have frustrations with the current kind of marketing messaging that kind of gets pushed out there.
Katie Vernoy 8:53
That’s so interesting.
… 8:56
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Katie Vernoy 8:56
We’ve talked about this topic a little bit. We’ll link to that over in the show notes as well, and it feels like you’ve gone deeper. You’ve done some research into this to identify what actually should work, or does work. What have you found?
Carrie Wiita 9:13
Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot of research. I have not done my own studies on this because, turns out, it’s real hard tolearn this.
Katie Vernoy 9:23
Well, you just didn’t manifest hard enough, and it’s probably a mindset issue around why you’re not able to do your own research.
Carrie Wiita 9:31
Secretly, I feel unqualified. Now, you know, the older I get, the more I realize there are no grown ups, and you’re probably qualified to do whatever you want in this life. So I embrace that. No. So my thesis was an interdisciplinary literature review, and it became interdisciplinary because it started with, well, I’m just gonna find out, what does our psychotherapy literature base say about marketing and how it affects therapy, how it affects clients? What works? What doesn’t. And I’m telling you like an exhaustive literature review, uncovered, this is back in like 2020, maybe uncovered 17, 20, maybe 25 articles about it. It’s not well studied. What is well studied is a lot of direct to consumer marketing. There was, for a while a push in the field to what could we learn from big pharma, and how could we market our field? But there’s been nothing about focusing on therapists specifically, like what works for individual therapists in this market. But for me, what really matters is it always struck me that I’m sure marketing must impact clients, how and to what extent, and shouldn’t we be concerned about that in terms of how it impacts the therapeutic relationship? It must, right? You know, we get told in grad school and everywhere that the most important part of building the therapeutic relationship is building rapport, right? And we get told that rapport building and the relationship begins in the first session, but it doesn’t. It begins when somebody develops a first impression of you as a therapist. That’s when the therapeutic relationship really begins. And so that was a lot of the literature that I looked at was, how do impressions form? What is a first impression and how does it affect the relationship that happens down the line? And it turns out that first impressions happen really fast. In less than a 10th of a second, you automatically form conclusions about a person based just on their face, a picture of their face. And then in the seconds after that, you start developing a more nuanced impression. But that is a really sticky thing that happens. They’re kind of resistant to change. You double doubt in your confidence, in your first impressions over time. So they happen. You can’t stop them from happening. And they happen wherever a person encounters you, whether it’s a referral, seeing your picture online, seeing you in person for the first time, if that’s how it happens. And then that first impression influences the trajectory of the relationship that happens afterwards. If it’s a good impression, it absolutely is more likely that the relationship will be good. It compounds in like an upward way, and the reverse is true. So it makes perfect sense to me that if and what we know from the common factors research is that the therapeutic relationship is one of the key pieces of therapy that is associated with improved clinical outcomes, no matter your approach to therapy. So if this is something that is so central to delivering good therapy outcomes for our clients, and this is the hill I will die on, is that marketing is clinical. It is absolutely a central part of the therapy service you provide. Marketing is clinical in that it sets the foundation for the therapeutic relationship, and it allows you to optimize and leverage the relationship, client expectations for therapy and client preferences for therapy. It’s this huge clinical opportunity we have that we overlook in many ways, because our field tells us we should hate marketing. We should resist it. We should reject it. We should feel embarrassed if we do it. I hate that.
Curt Widhalm 13:13
So what should people do as far as marketing as this first therapeutic intervention? Should I just plaster my face out on billboards and say, You like this face, come see me.
Carrie Wiita 13:27
I mean, that is definitely one way to go about it. And to be honest, like that is true. Like it is unfortunate. There is, to a certain extent you cannot control the idiosyncrasies of the impressions that are formed by other people about you. There is an extent to which it’s uncontrollable. So yeah, some people will like your face and some people will not like your face. More important, some people will look at you and think you look like a therapist to me, and you look like the right therapist for me, and some people will not and that’s unavoidable. And I actually think it’s great. I think good marketing should do two things in equal measure. It should inspire approach behavior and right fit clients and avoid behavior in wrong fit clients. Because one of the problems that we have in our field right is dropout, particularly early dropout, that is a clinical problem, but also a business problem for therapists. The most often occurring number of sessions in our field is one, and that means that a lot a lot of clients set an appointment, get to the first appointment, to the intake session, and then never come back. And what I think happens is they make the appointment, form an impression. They have an idea of who the therapist is, what therapy is going to be like, and whatever that impression is that they make in their head by the time they get to the first session and show up for it, they’re hoping that that’s what they’re going to get, because they’ve decided like that might work for me, for whatever their unique brain process is. For whatever reason they think the story they’ve told up in their head about what this is going to be like, it’s likely to work. So I’m going to show up, and then what they get in the first session is not what they put together in their head. So I think marketing for therapists needs to do three major things, but one of the major things is to enhance a client’s predictive capacity. Therapy services are extremely intangible, and in this way, they differ from a lot of other purchases that consumers make, and so that causes a lot of anxiety on the consumer side. So it’s not like buying a car where you can test drive it before you buy or like a t-shirt, where you can try it on in the store and make sure that this is gonna this purchase will be worth the money, will be worth the investment, right? And even with a lot of those purchases, you have the security of knowing that if, after you make the purchase, if you decide this wasn’t a good choice, you can take it back. There is some mechanism by which you can recoup what you put out. With intangible services like therapy, that’s not possible. So what this does is it ramps up consumer anxiety before they make the purchase. And what that looks like in the consumer life cycle is a lot of shopping and a lot of data gathering. And what they’re trying to do is collect information that will help them form a better prediction of what therapy with you is going to be like, and that’s what I think marketing should do. I think marketing should be communicating to potential clients what you’re like, what therapy with you is going to be like, so that to first of all, so that you can honor their preferences. They should be self selecting by their strong preferences. If you are a super woo woo therapist, I want that all over your stuff, so that the person who wants you know a mind doctor takes one look at your website and bounces. Don’t waste their time and don’t waste your time. So that, I believe, is a fair thing to do for clients, and the best thing you can do for your marketing.
Katie Vernoy 17:05
There’s two thoughts I have. The first one is in our field, this is, I think, mostly changed, but folks want to be professional, they want to look polished. They want to have all of that. And if that’s not how they show up in the room, this completely decreases the predictive ability of the consumer. And so to me, it suggests I’m just repeating what you said. You know, the woo, woo website, right? The whatever, but, but actually having a headshot that looks like you, and all of those things. So that’s a thought. The the other question, I guess I want to get to is around the amount of self awareness that’s required to be able to put yourself out there appropriately, in or effectively, maybe that’s a better word, in this space. Because I think in the work that I’ve done with some clinicians and getting their practices started, those kinds of things, there’s a lot of confusion and potentially not a huge amount of awareness around what a client gets from them. I think over time that can come and for folks who have that ability to self assess and really take stock, I think that becomes more possible. But I think there are a lot of therapists who don’t get past what they should be as a therapist to a place of who they are as a therapist, and understand how they’re perceived.
Carrie Wiita 18:32
Absolutely okay? So these are two huge questions, right? And they’re related. So what you’re talking about with this idea of professionalism in our field, we know that we get a lot of like shoulding voices. You should be this way. You should act this way. A therapist should or should not, definitely do X, Y, Z in public, right? One of the things that I really learned is that our field, kind of on purpose, created this unspoken message that good therapists don’t talk about themselves in public. This was seeded in the very foundations of our field, because when psychotherapy became a thing, the predominant approach to therapy was psychoanalysis, and one of the clinical tent poles of psychoanalysis is the unknowability of the therapist to the client. If the client knows personal things about the therapist, attains the transference, it ruins therapy. It makes therapy itself, the clinical act impossible. So at the very beginning, this idea that central to therapy working is the therapist being unknowable. I’m condensing so much into this, because I want to be aware of time, but at the same time, there is also our field came about at a time when we were in the birth of our field, especially the post world war two era. We really wanted to maintain status parity with medical doctors. We wanted to be seen like them and not seen like some woo, woo offshoot, right? Right? And so what we did was we cribbed a lot of stuff culturally from medical doctors in order for us to be seen by the public as professionals who know a lot and are very, you know, high status. We’re white collar professionals. We’re not tarot card readers or whatever they had in 1946. So what you actually see this like straight up, we took our ethics codes and we based them on the ethics codes of the American Medical Association, which, and if you get into it, it’s super wonky, and I can, I won’t. But it gets really specific about how you can and should market yourself, and it has nothing to do with ethics of the client. And like, you know, issues of power and status and nothing. It’s like, we don’t do that. That’s fine for some people, but we’re doctors, we don’t do that. And so things like, you know, you’re not allowed to make claims in your marketing and your phone book ad, it’s like, it’s so funny, like, once you see it in black and white, it’s unbelievable. But it really has to do with these, like, status issues that I think a lot of therapists today don’t relate to. But these messages have still come down to us. So we get into this field, and we inherit from a lot of the folks that have come before us in the field our professors or supervisors, directors at clinics. A lot of people come into this field because that appeals to them. They want to be that kind of professional. And so, of course, those are the messages that they propagate within the field to people who come after them, right? And so even though it’s not really spoken straight out, we get this messaging that, this sense that, like, you know, good therapists don’t want to market. They just want to do good work and put out their shingle, and the clients will come. That sense is still very much in effect in the medical community today. So I think it’s up to therapists to decide whether or not they agree with that or not, you can be that kind of professional. You don’t have to be. Any kind of therapeutic approach, from the most woo woo to the most like uptight medical model approach to therapy has been demonstrated to be effective in working with clients. It has more to do with the individual therapist than any specific approach to therapy what works best for clients.
… 22:23
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Carrie Wiita 22:23
So I say all this because I think the very first thing that therapists need to do is start to identify these shoulding voices. When they think about putting themselves out in public, online, making a psychology to date profile, making a website, dude, start listening to the voices that start coming up for you. For a lot of people, it’s this, like amorphous what is my old supervisor going to think or what are my peers going to say behind my back about this website I’m building? For some people, it’s family members. What are my family members going to think about me putting this out there? Start tracking those and just you have to be aware that where this is coming from for you, and it’s a highly, highly personal process. For some people, for example, if it’s a family thing, right, there may be some things that you are not comfortable talking about and making a part of your professional identity because it could hurt or offend or somehow harm your family members. That’s a personal decision that you have to make, but that you get to make. There are also plenty of options for taking a totally different approach to your professional identity, and that hasn’t found to be counter to clinical work either. So being a woo woo therapist, that’s going to be a perfect match for a client who is looking for a woo woo therapist. So that’s leads to your next question in terms of building like, how do you even figure out who you are? It starts with figuring out what isn’t yours, what comes from outside, and what are voices that you’re afraid of what someone else will say when you post something, right. Then it starts with a real introspection about you. You are different from every other therapist. The first time you ever did a session, you were different from every other therapist. You bring, and this is what’s core to interpersonal branding is you are experienced by others in a certain way. There is something that people want from you, that people come to you for, that people get from you, and it’s a process of figuring out what that is and using it in your clinical work. The reality is it doesn’t start from today. You have been doing this your whole life. We all have. As social creatures, that is self presentation, and the management of self presentation is something that we do on the regular from the time we start to learn social skills. So, you know, there’s things that people assume about you when you go out into the world, right? And so that is data that you want to start incorporating it know that when you sit down in a chair with a client, it’s likely that they’re having a similar reaction to every other person that you’ve met in your life. And that’s where then the process of interpersonal branding is, how do you work with that, or how do you change it?
Curt Widhalm 25:19
So, how do you work with that? Or how do you change it?
Carrie Wiita 25:24
It takes a long time. It doesn’t take a long time. The reality is, it starts with if you’re working with clients right now, you’re doing it. You’ve got an interpersonal brand. Your interpersonal brand is simply what you’re putting out there, how you’re experienced by others. But it’s unfortunately also the professional identity that you need to live in and wake up and do and perform every single day in your professional life, and just getting into this later, but like, you get one public professional identity these days, one. And so if you’re a therapist, that is going to be your main career, then that one public professional identity most likely needs to serve that career.
Curt Widhalm 26:06
So what you’re describing is this is why Dwayne Johnson plays the exact same character in every movie.
Carrie Wiita 26:13
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that that’s part of it, and it’s based on a concept called context collapse. So before the internet, we all had, you know, like these different silos of experience in our lives, these different contexts. So you had your family, your work, work friends, your, you know, church friends, your friend friends, right? And to some extent, you could be a different person with each of these groups. But the internet has collapsed all of those contexts into one. So now anyone from any of these different contexts of your life can see you performing for these other groups. And if you have an identity that is more or less cohesive across all of these groups, then it’s fine. It’s not, it doesn’t cause any problems. But if you are acting drastically different in front of these different groups, you risk what’s called an expectancy violation. This is where someone’s expectations of you are violated, and in the research, it shows that what happens when an expectancy violation occurs is the person experiencing that experiences a breach of trust, experiences it as a breach of trust, and it starts to erode faith in the relationship. So it feels like a betrayal, like you’re you, you told me you were this person, and now here I see you being a different person. So where’s the lie? Right? Because of this, it’s very difficult, and therapists like are so aware of this, it’s difficult to navigate and maintain all of these different identities, because we get told, you know, when we come into the field that, oh, well, there’s your personal life, keep that on lockdown. No one should know anything about that. And you should be all about your clients. And the focus should be on your clients when you’re working as a therapist and being a therapist. It’s impossible these days. There’s some great research out there right now. There’s no answers, but there’s some interesting papers on particularly how strongly psychodynamic therapists deal with this, and what does this mean for the practice of psychodynamic therapy? Because in that approach to therapy, maintaining a more blank screen, blank slate, whatever you want to call it, is pretty critical to the therapeutic relationship and the actual work. And so scholars are doing some good wrestling with what does the modern era mean for us? Most therapists have a more, like eclectic, integrative, whatever you want to call it, approach, and there tends to be more of like a relaxing around those sort of boundaries and so you can have more of your personality show through. The truth is this public professional identity that you have, it has to feel comfortable for you, so it has to be meaningful and authentic to you, so that your career is sustainable. Because again, you have to wake up and do this every single day. But it also has to be useful to your clients. It has to be something that they can make use of in the work of therapy. So whatever that means, it can mean a million different things. Some people who are going into therapy, the therapist they need and want is Sigmund Freud. Does that mean, like, I mean genuinely, so does that mean we should all be wearing, you know, tweed jackets and having a pipe and, you know, no, like, that’s not gonna fit for a lot of people, because there are also clients out there who think I want the woo therapist who does tarot cards in session with me, and that is also legitimate. So I know that when I say this stuff, a lot of times, the reaction is like, Oh my God, like, it sounds like a lot, and that’s going to be a huge journey to get there. And it can be, because what we’re talking about is designing the professional identity you want to be. My work really, like, relies on the concept of the project of the self, this idea that one of the things that we are doing, all of us as humans, is working on this project of the capitalist self, which is, you know, trying to put together things that add up to our ideal person that we would like to be in the world. And in a socially constructed environment what we do is kind of collect symbols that represent to others that, hey, I’m a little bit closer to this person that I want to be, and I think marketing does that. Marketing can help you create that and become the person that you want to be in a public way. And so that person is always going to be far out there, and they’re always going to be changing. This is a constant process of evolution. That’s why I designed a framework that is purposefully iterative and dynamic. It’s not a step by step, five easy steps to your public professional identity. Like, no, that does like, I hate to break it to you, but if anyone is selling you that it’s just like therapy, like, would you believe anyone who’s like, five easy steps for the perfect relationship? No, you wouldn’t. And unfortunately, marketing is just like that, because it really comes down to so much more than just like social media engagement. It’s about your relationship with yourself, your relationship with your clients, who you want to be in the world, the career you want to have. So yes, you’re always working towards who you want to become. But the reality is, you’ve got a session in 30 minutes, and you are going to be somebody when you walk into that session. So who are you going to be? You don’t have time to develop it. It’s Who are you now? That’s where you start from. And therapists, so many of us have this, like, I’m gonna get it wrong, like, there’s no wrong, there’s no wrong. It’s again, everyone’s making this up. No one knows what makes a good therapist. Anyone who says they do that they know literally hasn’t read the research. So it’s important to like, connect to the things that we do know, or it’s like the relationship and establishing rapport with your client. And for a lot of people, you know, when you walk into the room that like, there’s a certain way that you are with this client, and there’s a certain way you are with a different client, but overall, none of them would be shocked if they ran into you, or if they watched a video of another session with another client. It’s going to be under the general umbrella. So where are you right now? What does that general umbrella look like? What do you offer? Why would somebody come to you instead of the therapist next door? That’s where it starts.
Curt Widhalm 32:37
But I just want to do CBT.
Carrie Wiita 32:39
Yeah. That’s fine. That’s great. I mean, I love it. I love it when people just want to do something like that. Because great. You’ve got a roadmap. But the reality is that I forget the NIMS study. I forgot the year, but it was a study where they rigorously trained therapists in very manualized CBT. The idea was, we’re going to get all these therapists to do CBT as the same as possible.
Curt Widhalm 33:06
As CBT-y as possible.
Carrie Wiita 33:08
Exactly, CBT as possible, to eliminate that being a confounding variable, the therapist’s effects being a confounding variable. And the idea was, everyone was going to do therapy as close as possible to the same way. And what they found was that the differences of experience in therapy were greater between different therapists than within each therapist’s clientele. You still had some therapist that got consistently better results than other therapists, even when they’re doing the exact same CBT. CBT coming out of you is going to be different from CBT coming out of Katie, right? So, and I don’t care how manualized and how rigorous you do it, and so if you want to do CBT, great, what your marketing is going to be is all about explaining to your client why CBT is the gold standard, why they should want it, who it works for, what it looks like, what it does, because clients don’t know. They need to be educated about it, and then you need to figure out how people experience you, and work that into your interpersonal brand, because that is what differentiates you from other people.
Katie Vernoy 34:21
I could talk about this forever, and the place that my mind is going is a way longer conversation, so maybe you’ll have a TO BE CONTINUED kind of answer. But when we talk about the interpersonal the co-creation of how you’re received with your clients, there’s three things that I thought of. The first one is I got into being a therapist as a first career, and so I was developing as a human while I was learning how to be a therapist, and I had this whole conversation with somebody at a conference. We actually recorded it. I don’t know where it ended up. But if you aren’t fully developed in yourself and you become a therapist, I think there’s a whole other self exploration that needs to happen, because there’s so much about you that’s still under construction. But then the other two things are really about personal growth and safety. I’m thinking about code switching and autistic masking, and how much there would be a need to understand how you show up authentically, but also how you show up safely, and also how much you know about yourself if you’re learning new things about yourself over time. So I don’t know that I have a full question there. I think there’s so much to discuss there, but I’m going to reflect on the fact that this can also be a very dynamic process, from what you talked about, as you’re learning yourself, as you’re understanding safety and society changes, and how much I can fully show up with all of my neurodivergence, or all of my, you know, fill in the blank, I think are things that are going to be part of this conversation too.
Carrie Wiita 35:59
Yeah, you’re never a fully formed person or fully developed person. You’re always in this process of development. And the truth is that everything is just marketing strategies and tactics, and it’s free on the internet, guys, it’s everywhere. You can learn how to do anything, but none of it helps if you don’t know what you’re selling. If you don’t start with that piece, who are you? And so that’s that’s what I do, is I help people figure out, I help therapists and service providers figure out who are they, professionally, because it is different. And Katie, you hit the nail on the head. This is something I go in depth on in my program. Is, how do you navigate when your identity is oppressed, marginalized, right, and maybe not as marketable? It’s a really tough space to be in, and it requires a lot of decision making up front. But I do think it’s what a lot of people struggle with when they get marketing advice that is really meant for a dominant culture and doesn’t feel right to them, and then they get hit with, well, do you have imposter syndrome?
Katie Vernoy 37:11
Yeah.
Carrie Wiita 37:12
Maybe not. It might be something bigger going on.
Katie Vernoy 37:15
Yeah. Yeah, there’s so much there. I think there’s a lot longer conversation around that, because I think that, yes, they might not be marketable, or might be extremely marketable, but also put them in the line of fire. And so I think it’s important to have the conversation about the vulnerability of selling yourself.
Carrie Wiita 37:33
Yep, it’s really selling a relationship with yourself. I just want to throw that out there, because we get told that marketing is selling ourselves and it genuinely is selling a relationship with you.
Katie Vernoy 37:45
I like that clarification.
Curt Widhalm 37:48
Where can people find out more about you and your program, and have you ever considered doing a podcast before?
Carrie Wiita 37:58
My podcast co host left me for another field. But yes, you can find me at www.interpersonalbranding.com, I’m going to be starting a weekly free marketing strategy class. So go there. Sign up. Because I want to teach you the basic stuff that’s really obvious to find if you know where to look and should be free. You can also get on the wait list for my program.
Curt Widhalm 38:24
And we will include links to all of those in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. Follow us on our social media, join us in our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, to continue on with this conversation, and until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Carrie Wiita.
… 38:39
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