Why Your Waitlist Isn't Success: A Conversation That Broke Me Open

You've built your dream practice. You're booked solid. People are telling you "You've made it!" because you have 52 people on your waitlist.

But instead of feeling successful, you're drowning. You wake up at 3am thinking about all the people you can't help. You feel guilty every time you take a day off. You're starting to realize that your "success" feels suspiciously like moral injury.

Maybe you think a full practice means you're doing everything right. Maybe you've been told that waitlists are proof of your value and expertise. Maybe you're starting to suspect that trying to save everyone individually is slowly killing you—and leaving the people who need help most behind.

What if I told you that your waitlist isn't proof you've succeeded—it's proof the system is fundamentally broken?

While we're celebrating individual capacity metrics, we're missing a profound truth: the healing model we inherited was never designed to work. We're trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon, and then wondering why we're exhausted and people are still drowning.

In this raw, unfiltered conversation, I share a call that changed everything:

• Why your waitlist is actually a wound in a broken system—not a badge of honour
• The uncomfortable truth about who actually makes it off waitlists (and who gets left behind)
• How we've been conditioned to believe healing only happens in isolation—and why that's destroying us
• The difference between being the healer and creating conditions for healing
• Why the math of one-person-one-hour-one-room will never add up to liberation
• How traditional therapy recreates the same systems we're trying to heal people from
• The moment my colleague realized she was complicit in leaving people behind
• Why "I built my dream practice and now it feels like a nightmare" is the most honest thing anyone has said about modern therapy
• How to shift from scarcity-based individual healing to abundance-based community transformation
• The revolutionary idea that your value isn't in how many people you personally save
• Why moral injury disguised as success is keeping therapists trapped and clients waiting
• The vision of what becomes possible when we stop trying to be the sole source of healing

Bottom Line: The system that creates waitlists—that makes healing scarce, keeps people isolated, and exhausts therapists—is counting on us being too tired to imagine anything different. But your waitlist isn't your fault. Staying stuck in a system that creates it when you know there's another way? That's a choice.

Your colleague with 52 people waiting isn't failing. The system is. And maybe it's time we all chose differently.

🎧 Ready to break free from the broken system?

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🚀 Ready to create healing that serves everyone—including you? Join other visionary therapists who are building sustainable, community-centered practices in The Incubator: https://therapistsrising.com/incubator

Keywords: therapist waitlist problems, therapy practice burnout, broken mental health system, therapist moral injury, sustainable therapy practice, community-based healing, group therapy vs individual therapy, therapist capacity issues, mental health accessibility, healing in community, therapy practice transformation, therapist overwhelm, ethical therapy practice, systemic change in mental health, liberation-based therapy, collective healing approaches