Ten Years In: A Billings Therapist Looks Back at a Decade of Private Practice

It was the spring of 2016. I was sitting on my bed, staring at my phone, wondering if it would ever ring.

I had just put up a profile on Psychology Today. That was the whole strategy. I was working a full-time job during the day, and at night I was hoping that a private practice was something I could actually do. Some evenings the phone stayed quiet. Some evenings I refreshed my email and tried not to take it personally. I had no idea if any of this would work.

On May 31, 2026, I will mark ten years since I formalized that business. It wasn't called Brighter Sky Counseling then. It was just me, part-time, hoping. I didn't leave my full-time job until 2017. The full ten years of actually doing private practice as my real life is still a year away. But this date, the day I said yes on paper to working for myself, is the one that started everything.

I want to tell you about the decade that brought me to that bed and to the phone, and the decade that followed. Not because the story is unusual, but because I think there are parts of it that other therapists, other small business owners, and the people who trust us with their care might recognize.

Before the leap

I came back to Montana in the spring of 2007, fresh out of graduate school, and started a counseling job that fall in a rural Montana school. I was new, scared, and aware that the stakes were real. The kids I was working with carried real things. The supervision I was assigned was minimal, the structure of the program offered very little safety net, and I was told, more or less, to go.

I went.

I asked questions. I got to know the community. I lay awake at night worried I would miss something important. The fear didn't go away in those years. What I came to understand, slowly, is that the fear wasn't a sign I shouldn't be there. It was an accurate read of what I was holding and the importance of this work. 

The people who got me through those four years weren't my assigned supervisors. They were the colleagues sitting next to me, learning out loud alongside me. We had to run groups every day with kids who needed something real, and we had to invent most of it. We played a lot of card games. We did a lot of art projects. My Pinterest boards were on fire. I used to put in an Amazon order every time I felt insecure about a session, a new book or a new art supply, as if the right tool could close the gap between who I was and who I thought I should be. I laugh about it now. I still catch myself doing some version of it.

We talked about our fears and our wins. We laughed and cried and pushed each other to try new things. That is where I learned what real support actually looks like. Not on paper. Beside you, in the work.

I joked with one of those colleagues once that we would either still be at the school together in our sixties, wearing long flowing skirts and hanging wind chimes in our classrooms, or that maybe someday we would open a private practice together. We said it as a joke because saying it seriously felt too risky. I wasn't seeing other therapists in our small community doing private practice. It didn't feel achievable. It felt like something you talked about but didn't actually do.

After four years at the first school, I spent another four at a local middle school. Then in 2015, my family moved to Billings. It was an unexpected change and a hard one. I left work I had done for eight years and stepped into new agencies and full-time hours in a community where I wasn't yet sure I was happy. I had small kids. My husband was adjusting too. And pretty quickly I realized that the structure wasn't working. Not for me, not for my family, and honestly, not for my clients. I was less present than I needed to be for the work, for my family or for myself. 

That is when I started talking with a colleague in Billings about what private practice might actually look like. The same conversation I had once joked about with my friend at the rural school. This time we meant it. By the spring of 2016 my profile was up and I was waiting for the phone to ring.

The hardest thing I carry from that time

There is something else I carry from those earlier years that doesn't fit neatly into a story about career steps. While I was working at the agency that had brought me to Billings, I learned that a young person I had previously worked with had died by suicide. I had left that job by then. I was not her active therapist. But I had known her, and her death changed me.

Suicide is real. As therapists, we are trained to screen for it. We are taught the questions to ask and the protocols to follow. I had screened. I had done the work I was trained to do. And still, all of that training is one thing in the classroom, and another thing entirely when you learn that someone you once sat across from is gone. It doesn't feel fully real until it is, and then it cannot ever be unreal again.

It brought me, over time, into suicide prevention work outside the therapy room. I think about her often. And it is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in the importance of this profession. Therapy, done well, saves lives. I am more sure of that today than I was ten years ago and part of my why for giving back to others and this community. 

The leap, and the accident

The word that kept coming up when I was deciding whether to leave my full-time job for private practice was responsibility. Other people said it to me. I said it to myself. There were so many responsible reasons to stay where it was safe and predictable. I had a family. I had bills. The unknown was real.

What I eventually understood is that I also had a responsibility to myself. To honor the part of me that couldn't stay stuck for the sake of predictability. In 2017 I left my full-time job and went all in on private practice.

A couple of years later, a former landlord caught me off guard. I was busy, working out of a small office, and he approached me one day and said, you look pretty busy. Have you thought about expanding? I would help you build out the space. I had not thought about expanding. I had not set out to become a group practice owner. I joke now that I am an accidental one. But I took the leap, because the same instinct kept showing up. There could be room for more people. Other therapists could be in this space with me. Collaboration could happen again.

That decision is how Brighter Sky Counseling came to be what it is. A team rather than one therapist. A practice rather than a profile.

What I have had to learn since

I would love to tell you I knew what I was doing as an employer. I didn't. My first time hiring, I genuinely thought, if I am just the best boss ever, I won't have any problems. I'll spare you the suspense. That is not how it works.

Leading a team takes more than generosity. It takes clear expectations, hard conversations, and the willingness to hold people accountable to what the practice needs to keep its doors open and its therapists paid. I have also had to make peace with a particular version of loss. Some of the therapists who have come through Brighter Sky Counseling have moved on to open their own practices. I genuinely love that. Two people can both be doing their best and still need different directions. The therapists who have grown beyond what I could offer them are part of what BSC has contributed to mental health in this community. That is not turnover. That is impact.

I have also learned that business is not just business. At least not for me. Business is not not personal. It is my whole life. I have had experiences in the last decade where I have felt taken advantage of, where I have come up against people who seem to genuinely believe that it's only business is a moral framework rather than a convenient one. That has cost me something. The work, for me, is to make the hard calls that keep the practice and its people supported without becoming someone I don't want to be in the process. I am still figuring that one out. I might always be.

And then there is marketing. Which I once thought was sleazy and cringe. These days my team and I make social media videos. My face is on them. I don't enjoy watching them. I scroll past my own posts and try not to cringe. Every time I do it anyway, I tell myself the same thing. This is how the right people find the right therapist. This is care for the practice, my staff and it's care for the people who need us. Just a few weeks ago, a client mentioned in session that he had seen one of those videos. He spoke kindly about it. That comment closed a loop I couldn't close from my side. The cringe is mine. The benefit, is worth it. I'm willing to keep cringing for that.

What I notice now

A few weeks ago in group supervision, I watched my team light up about their clinical work. The eagerness to learn a new approach. The worry about whether a session went well. The fierce care about a particular client. I loved every minute of it.

I also noticed something in myself. The fire I have now isn't the same fire I had in 2016. I still love sitting with clients. That has not changed. But something else has grown alongside it, a passion for creating the conditions that let other passionate therapists do this work well. I felt this very directly during a recent sudden change in insurance policy that interrupted sessions across our practice almost overnight. It was scary how fast a decision made somewhere far away could reach into individual therapy rooms. What was beautiful was the response. A community of therapists and advocates and professional networks coordinated and pushed back, and the policy was changed. I don't know yet what that experience means for the next chapter for me. Something is emerging. I am listening for it.

Looking around

Ten years feels like a long time and like no time at all. Both are true.

The version of me sitting on her bed in 2016, refreshing her email and hoping, did not know any of this was coming. Brighter Sky Counseling, a team of skilled therapists, an office full of clients, a practice rooted in this community. She would not have believed any of it. She just took the next small step, and then another, and then another.

None of it has been learned alone. There were the colleagues at the rural school who held me up when the formal structure didn't. The friend who joked with me about wind chimes and someday-practices. The friend in Billings who dreamed the next chapter alongside me. The landlord who saw something in me before I saw it in myself. My staff who saw something they wanted to be a part of. My husband and kids, who lived through every version of this with me. The therapists, admin staff, and clients who make Brighter Sky Counseling what it is now. I like doing things with people along side them.  That has been the thread through every chapter of this decade and will be for the next.