let your dreams shape your work
build a practice that sings to your soul
step into your full power as a therapist
About This Guide
When I was first building my first practice, I used my social work 💪🏻 and 🧠 to learn the step-by-step moves of building and running a private practice. For many years, private practice was my side hustle while I worked in community mental health, emergency departments, hospitals and primary care clinics. But after over 2 decades of exhausting anti-oppressive practice within heartbreaking systems of care, I decided to say no to continuing to work in systems where I couldn't take care of myself. So I took a risk, quit my job, and took the leap into full time private practice. I never looked back. While there are some benefits to working in a group practice, it can also be really difficult to make a living wage AND have a sustainable work-life balance with the high client contact requirements and income sharing most group practices require. Today most of my work is supervising and consulting with liberation-aligned trauma therapists. I have helped many folx to build a thriving, liberation-aligned private practice. While you can pay someone for basically every step of building a private practice (forming a business and registering it with the state, paneling with insurance companies, building the literal scaffolding of your practice) you don't have to. You CAN do it yourself! Within the system of capitalism, I believe the best we can ever hope for is harm reduction. But, I also believe that harm reduction creates more room to be visionary, which in turn moves us toward a collectivist culture. The more capacity we have to listen to our bodies and hearts, and the more we are connected to the truth of interdependence and the more we can show up for community, the planet and for our collective liberation. Doing work that feeds your soul can really help with this. Note: While some of the resources listed here are national and will apply to anyone in the so-called US, some of the resources listed here are local and specific to OR and WA states. Local resources will offer a blueprint for a structure that could work well in other states, but you'll have to use your own social work 💪🏻 and 🧠 to navigate that 🗺️.
quEerMDR supervisor, consultant and creatrix
horizon greene, LICSW/LCSW (they/she). I am a queer fat nonbinary femme who practices at the intersections of oppression, grief, trauma and liberation. My consultation and trauma healing practice is deeply woven within liberatory practice culture and I come from a lineage of witches and healers dedicated to justice for all people with a lived experience of oppression. I have spent more than 23 years in a deep study of how healing happens, learning to undo oppression while learning to co-create cultures of justice and belonging. My training has included intensive learnings in somatics, trauma healing, anti-oppressive practices, anti-racism, liberatory culture building and ritual. My therapy practice is a blending of liberatory healing practices rooted in the relational neurosciences, somatic wisdom, parts work, ancestral healing, magic and love. I accompany people in the deep work of making real what our souls know is possible. I am a lifetime student of how healing happens and am an EMDR Certified Therapist, an EMDR Consultant and a Level 2 Trained IFS Therapist. I completed a 9 month intensive in Somatic Abolitionism for Therapists with Resmaa Menakem and am a Certified Body Trust® Provider. I am regularly a teaching assistant for the beautiful QTIFS program.
You can build a sustainable private practice. And, you can do it yourself.
I've shared this step-by-step guide to building your own private practice with many folx over the years and I've always shared it without cost. So it's my total pleasure to offer it to you here.
Click here to download.