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with Cynthia Martin
A space for self-reflection and renewal
Where healing is the art of becoming whole.
For Therapists
education
teaching
coaching
education
How to Therapist: a Guide to the Early Years
How to Therapist: A Practical and Human Guide to the Early Years is a grounded guide for new and early-career therapists navigating the most formative—and often disorienting—years of clinical work. Graduate school teaches theory. This book teaches you how to be a therapist. Written from within the U.S. training and licensure landscape, How to Therapist bridges the gap between education and real-world practice.
Rather than presenting therapy as a set of techniques to master, the book approaches becoming a therapist as a developmental and relational process. With warmth, humor, and psychological depth, it offers practical guidance on the external realities of early clinical work—scope of practice, supervision, fees, documentation, ethics, licensure pathways, and private practice logistics—while also attending to the internal terrain that shapes the work: impostor syndrome, countertransference, burnout, enactments, relational ruptures, and the gradual development of a therapist’s voice.
Designed to be read straight through, used as a reference, or brought into supervision and consultation spaces, How to Therapist serves as a field guide for building a practice that is ethical, sustainable, and alive—without flattening the humanity of the person doing the work.
If you’re at the threshold of this profession—uncertain, devoted, and learning in real time—How to Therapist meets you there, offering clarity, orientation, and companionship as you grow into the role.
A Therapist's Guide to Modern Marketing
Most therapists were trained for a referral economy that no longer exists.
This book offers a different way forward—one that doesn’t require performative marketing, constant content creation, or compromising your clinical values in order to be visible.
A Therapist's Guide to Modern Marketing reframes marketing not as a strategy to execute, but as a living, relational system that grows over time. Rather than chasing tactics or trends, this book guides therapists in building a coherent, ethical, and sustainable presence—one that helps the right clients and referral partners find them naturally.
You’ll learn how to treat your website as the relational hub of your practice, clarify your niche as a signal rather than a box, write in language that resonates with both humans and search engines, and create alignment across directories, referrals, and professional spaces. The approach integrates practical guidance on SEO, directories, and visibility with deep attention to nervous system safety, coherence, and the psychological realities of being seen.
This is not a step-by-step funnel or a hustle-based marketing plan. It is a framework for building trust before the first session ever begins—through clarity, consistency, and relational presence.
Designed for therapists who want their marketing to feel as grounded and ethical as their clinical work, A Therapist's Guide to Modern Marketing offers a blueprint you can return to again and again as your practice evolves.
teaching
Dydactic Workshops on Request
I offer dynamic, real-world trainings for counseling centers, graduate programs, and consultation groups, delivered in person throughout the San Francisco Bay Area or virtually across the United States. Rooted in the material from my book, How to Therapist: A Practical and Human Guide to the Early Years, my workshops are designed for trainees and associates navigating the real terrain of early clinical work—where skill-building, ethics, and inner development are inseparable, and where the person of the therapist is part of the instrument. Topics can be customized to fit your program’s needs and include scope of practice, supervision dynamics, structuring the first session, setting fees, going over office policies with new clients, consultation calls, rupture and repair, transference/countertransference, enactments, burnout, imposter syndrome, documentation, licensure timelines, marketing basics, and building a sustainable, ethically grounded practice.
Dyadics are typically scheduled as either a one-off 2-hour training ($250) or a two-part series of 90-minute sessions on different weeks ($400). If you’d like to explore a fit, email me with what you have in mind—your setting, your trainees’ level, and the topics you're interested in—and I’ll suggest a format and topic arc that meets your program well.
coaching
1-1 coaching $125/hr
I offer 1:1 coaching for new therapists who want short-term, practical support getting their practice off the ground—especially in that tender stretch where you’re suddenly “the therapist” in real time, with real clients, real paperwork. I spent a year managing Pierce Street Integral Counseling Center in San Francisco, supporting a cohort of roughly 15–20 graduate trainees each semester as they entered practicum and learned the day-to-day realities of clinical work for the first time.
In coaching, I help you build the infrastructure and rhythm that makes the work sustainable: setting up your office (virtual or in-person), show you how to use an EHR, write documentation and treatment plans, track billing, count hours, and map a realistic licensure timeline so you’re not reinventing the wheel every week.
We also work on how you actually hold the frame—paperwork conversations, boundaries, between-session contact, and the small decisions that quietly make you feel more confident. And because getting clients matters, we can cover the basics of practice-building too: website structure, SEO, and simple outreach so people can actually find you.
I’m happy to talk theory (including transference/countertransference and culturally humble practice), but this is not supervision, and I’ll regularly steer clinical material back toward your supervisor—my lane here is helping you become operationally solid, ethically clean, and more embodied in your role as a developing clinician.
Interested in working together? Head to my contact page to set up a free consultation call.
