The countercultural healer's guide for building a sustainable practice: work toward your purpose, grow your client base, and thrive with integrity within an unjust capitalist system.
The time for healing--and the time to be a healer--is now. Within a global landscape of racism, violence, misogyny, mass incarceration, and other intersecting systems of oppression, our society is sick, our communities are suffering, and our relationships with our own bodies and minds are disconnected. But within a mass-market, numb-out culture that's commodified wellness and reduced the political act of self-care to a hashtag, what does it mean to be a healer? And what does it mean to build a sustainable, values-driven practice in an unjust capitalist system?
In How to Build A Successful Healing Practice, therapist Laura Mae Northrup navigates the complexities of being a healer and staying true to your calling in a world built from systems designed to extract, oppress, and exploit. She addresses fundamental tensions that arise for practicing healers working in our late-stage capitalist culture, like how to:
• Maintain your ethical framework while prioritizing financial growth--and reconciling your calling as a healer with the need to take payment
• Market and brand your practice authentically, without feeling like a shill
• Examine your "shadow why": looking honestly at the baggage, unexamined biases, and unconscious motivations you bring to your work
• Resist burnout and recognize your limits within an extractive culture that valorizes overwork
• Connect to your emotional needs and spiritual goals, and honor their place in your healing practice
Structured in accessible, to-the-point chapters with practical writing and reflection prompts, Northrup offers readers real and honest approaches to thriving as healers, going deeper than the promise of a million-dollar practice or a minimum-effort game plan. Written for healers of all modalities--especially those that have been sidelined, underfunded, underresearched, or delegitimized within a Western capitalist framework--this book offers a nuanced, political, and social-justice informed guide to building the practice you want--and thriving as the healer you were born to be. LAURA MAE NORTHRUP, MFT is a practicing psychotherapist and educator. She obtained her master's degree in Somatic Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and is trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for the treatment of trauma. Northrup also trained with Janina Fisher, a well respected and internationally recognized trauma expert and completed a year long training in the spiritual aspects of trauma at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Northrup's work focuses on defining sexual violence through a spiritual and politicized lens, mentoring healing practitioners in creating a meaningful path, and supporting the spiritual integrity of our collective humanity. She is the creator and host of the podcast Inside Eyes, a series that explores the use of entheogens and psychedelics to heal sexual trauma and supervises junior clinicians at both the Sage Institute, a psychedelic therapy clinic, and the Grateful Heart Holistic Therapy Center. Northrup has lectured and taught workshops on the subjects of treating survivors of sexual trauma, psychedelics and entheogens, and how to build a sustainable healing practice. This is her first book.
