The In-Between: Lessons for New Therapists
“Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal.” — Rumi
Being a therapist is like embodying Rumi’s lamp, lifeboat, and ladder for your clients.
Who you are is the lamp: your inner light that creates warmth and safety in the darkness. It’s your authenticity and empathy that help clients feel seen, heard, and less alone.
What you know is the lifeboat: the vessel built from your training and skills. It steadies you both through turbulent waters and helps clients feel supported and secure.
How much you’ve healed is the ladder: the tool that allows you to guide clients toward hope and transformation.
With The Ibrido Method, therapists can hold the lamp, steer the lifeboat, and offer the ladder to their clients, making the work structured, steady, and hopeful. In a profession that can often feel overwhelming, having a clear way forward matters as much for therapists as it does for the people they serve.
I was reminded of this recently when talking with a new graduate who’s living in that in-between space. She was done with school, license approved by the state, but waiting for the certificate to show up in the mail. She’d been offered a position but couldn’t start yet because she needed to be paneled with insurance, and that paper license was holding up the process.
But the in-between is about more than paperwork. It’s also the season between starting and feeling competent in your knowledge, between being present in sessions and actually feeling confident in your skills. It’s the gap between memorizing theories and learning to trust your own clinical intuition. Every therapist lives through that stretch of time where you’re both learning and practicing, doubting and showing up, stretching and growing. It’s uncomfortable, and absolutely necessary.
Listening to her reminded me of something I sometimes forget after being a therapist for over 20 years: there are so many steps to getting licensed, credentialed, and started in practice. Back then, there weren’t companies to streamline the process. I piecemealed it together, one insurance panel and one contract at a time. My career unfolded a little like that too, blending a bit of this approach and a bit of that method until, eventually, I refined and streamlined the work into what is now The Ibrido Method.
Fast forward to today. Creating the method was, in many ways, simpler than creating the business to train it. Developing the model came from years of clinical practice and lived experience. Building the structure to share it with others has been its own journey.
That’s why last October I decided to get a business coach. On a recent group call, someone new to the program was feeling a little lost. Our coach jumped in and listed several concrete, actionable steps—boom, boom, boom. And I thought to myself: that’s exactly what The Ibrido Method does for therapists and their clients. It brings clarity to complexity. It breaks big, overwhelming experiences into clear, doable steps. Just like getting licensed, starting a practice, or building a business, healing isn’t one giant leap. It’s a series of steps you take, one at a time.
So if you’re a new therapist sitting in the in-between, know this: you don’t have to have it all figured out. Each step will lead to the next. And before long, you’ll look back and realize you’ve built something solid, whether it’s your practice, your career, or your own way of working. And if you’re a seasoned therapist, know this too: the in-between never really disappears. It simply shifts as you grow—whether you’re moving from student to clinician, from clinician to business owner, or from practitioner to teacher. At every stage, the lamp, the lifeboat, and the ladder are still there, reminding us that the work is less about arriving and more about becoming. Each day you show up with light, steadiness, and hope, you remind us that the in-between is part of becoming.