Simply Being turns seven in September.
Seven is a funny age. You’re definitely not a baby anymore. You have friends, opinions, a personality. You know what you like and what you don’t, although you probably still have a lot to figure out.
Simply Being started in September 2019 with me practicing alone in about a third of the little house we now occupy. I was already a trauma therapist and had a clear sense of how I wanted to work, but beyond that, there wasn’t some grand plan for what Simply Being would become. In fact, I had no business background at all.
What I figured out pretty quickly was that I didn’t really want to work alone. I wanted community.
Christi Sidwell first came onboard to partner with me on groups and then became my first hire. She’s now our Associate Director, which means she has been around for almost every version of Simply Being and has also had to live through almost every idea I’ve had along the way. She has been my partner in building what we are today.
Around this time, I completed my training as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and the identity of the practice began to take shape. Trauma had always been the center of my own work, and as we grew, we became more intentionally focused on trauma, the nervous system, attachment, and somatic and experiential modalities.
We also started acquiring more of the house.
Nicole joined us about a year later as our third therapist. She stayed for close to five years before leaving to build a cooperative of her own, something I love being part of our history. More therapists came after that, we took over more of the house, and eventually there wasn’t any more of the house to take over.
Around year three, we brought on our first interns. Because I’d spent many years teaching before becoming a therapist, this part felt particularly natural to me, although I don’t think I realized at the time that we were creating an internship program. We were just taking interns.
We’ve now had seven, including the two who just started with us, and we’ve hired three of them. One of our earliest interns was Dr. Katelyn Kalstein, who stayed after her internship and is now our Lead Ketamine Therapist. There is something especially gratifying about watching someone come into the practice while still developing as a therapist and then, years later, realizing she has become one of the people helping shape the practice itself.
Most of the therapists we’ve hired over the years are still with us. A few very loved ones have moved to other states. People have completed degrees and certifications here, gotten married, adopted pets, changed and grown in all sorts of ways. I don’t think I understood when I started a practice that there would eventually be this whole other history running alongside the business history—the lives of the people who have helped build it.
And somewhere along the way, Christi started bringing Dottie to work.
Dottie is her therapy dog and has her own very loyal fan base. Her contribution to the practice is difficult to quantify, although her popularity is not.
At about four and a half, Simply Being developed an interest in psychedelics.
Christi and I decided to enroll in a ten-month Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy certification program. We completed the program together, began developing our ketamine-assisted psychotherapy work, and that part of the practice has continued to grow. We now have four certified practitioners and offer individual and group KAP, and most recently couples KAP as well.
We also built two more offices somewhere in there because apparently taking over an entire house had still left us short on rooms.
Today we are a group of nine, soon to be ten. Plus Dottie.
Since 2019, we’ve provided more than 16,000 psychotherapy sessions to nearly 700 clients.
Those numbers still feel a little strange to me because when I think about Simply Being, I don’t really think in numbers. I think about the place and the people in it.
Once we started hiring beyond the first few therapists, I became increasingly aware that I wasn’t interested in building a practice simply by adding clinicians. I wanted a particular culture, and over time I’ve come to see one of my most important roles as protecting it.
We are a specialized boutique practice for survivors of trauma, but our clients come to us for many other reasons too: anxiety, depression, mood disorders, nervous system dysregulation, relationship difficulties, grief, life transitions, and sometimes simply the sense that something isn’t working anymore. We see people 16 and older and work with individuals, couples, families and groups. Our therapists are trained in a range of modalities because we’ve never believed there is one right way to do therapy or one approach that makes sense for every person.
We are also intentionally secular, which has always been important to me. People of every faith and people with no faith at all are welcome here. There isn’t an underlying religious orientation to our work; what matters are the beliefs, values and experiences of the person sitting in the room.
But the culture I’ve cared so much about creating isn’t only about our clients. It’s about our therapists too.
I want our folks to be well compensated for what they do and to have opportunities to keep learning and growing. I also want them to be cared about as individuals before they are cared about as therapists. I want to know what’s happening in their lives. I want there to be room for someone to have a hard day or need help or celebrate something wonderful. I want people to genuinely like coming to work and, just as importantly, to have lives outside of it.
So while we are absolutely client-centered, we are also pretty openly therapist-centered. I’ve never thought those things were contradictory. Therapists have nervous systems too, and it would be a little odd for a practice that talks as much as we do about safety, connection, authenticity and relationships to forget all of that when it comes to the people who work here.
I think some of this is apparent before you ever sit down with one of us. Simply Being is, literally, a house. It doesn’t feel much like a traditional mental health practice, and that’s intentional. It’s cozy, a little quirky, and we think about all the senses: the lighting, smells, sounds, textures, even what there is to eat and drink. There are snacks because sometimes you need a snack before talking about your childhood.
Depending on the day, Dottie may also be there to greet you.
Clients have called the house a refuge, which may be one of my favorite things anyone has ever said about it.
There is serious work happening behind the doors here every day, but we don’t feel the need to be serious all the time. We’re pretty laid-back. We laugh. We celebrate birthdays and accomplishments. We go out together. People wander into each other’s offices. There are conversations in the kitchen that have absolutely nothing to do with therapy. We genuinely enjoy one another.
We’re a bit like a family working in a storybook therapy house, although when I write it that way it sounds considerably more cult-like than intended.
Seven years of operating a growing practice inside a storybook house has also required us to become very good at adapting.
Which brings me to parking!
Parking has been an ongoing Simply Being saga. We’ve strategized about it, rearranged it, given instructions about it, apologized for it and probably devoted more collective brainpower to it than anyone should ever devote to parking. About two years ago we managed to add another space, which felt like a major victory. We would like to add more, but the lovely and lively city of Berry Hill would not. Even so, we love it here.
So parking has become less of a problem we’re going to solve once and for all and more of a Simply Being quirk. We explain it, we accommodate it, we figure it out. Like many things over the past seven years, it isn’t exactly how I would design it if there were no constraints, but we’ve learned how to make it work.
I sometimes have the same feeling about the practice as a whole. There are moments when I look around and think this all happened almost accidentally.
I started Simply Being without any business background. I didn’t have a five-year plan, much less a seven-year one. I didn’t know we’d have an internship program or a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy program. I didn’t know we’d eventually occupy the entire house. I certainly didn’t know I’d spend this much of my adult life thinking about parking.
Even now, saying I built this feels a little surreal. But when I actually go back through our history, I realize that the accidental version of the story isn’t really true. I didn’t know exactly where we were going, but the decisions that got us here were remarkably intentional.
I brought Christi in because I wanted community, and she has become like a sister to me. We became a trauma-focused, somatic practice because that reflected what I believed about therapy. We took interns because teaching and mentoring mattered to me. Christi and I spent ten months training in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy because we believed there was something meaningful there for our clients. And, of course, now we are immersed in another long commitment learning IFS more deeply. We’ve hired slowly because I’ve always cared more about finding the right person than filling an empty office. And I’ve probably been most intentional of all about the culture, even before I had language for what I was trying to protect.
Maybe that’s the thing I’ve learned from building Simply Being: you can be very intentional about the next choice without having any idea where all those choices will eventually lead.
And now somehow we’re seven.
I don’t know exactly what Simply Being will look like at ten or fifteen. We occasionally talk about a second location, and maybe one day we’ll have one. But we’re also pretty happy in our storybook therapy house, and growth for the sake of being bigger has never been particularly interesting to us.
Seven years ago, I wanted a place where I could do the kind of therapy I believed in. Then I realized I wanted some company. The rest happened slowly enough that sometimes I missed the fact that we were building something.
At seven, Simply Being knows itself pretty well.
I’m still getting used to the fact that I dreamt this business up in pieces. That I built it, and that our team has helped continue to develop it into what it is today.
Happy Birthday, Simply Being Therapy!