There are months when my therapy diary fills up. There are also months when things go incredibly quiet, and I notice my bank balance decreasing, sometimes slipping into my overdraft. These quiet months used to scare me. I’m slowly learning that they’re some of the most useful months I get.
There’s a rhythm to self-employment in the therapy industry, and other therapists, especially those with far more years in this work than me, openly acknowledge the same pattern. When the world has something else on its mind (wars, political turbulence, even something as positive as the World Cup), people quietly put off looking after their mental health. The work doesn’t stop being needed. It just stops being a priority for a while.
There’s also something built into how I work. I don’t take clients on for the long haul; my job is to help someone heal what they came for, and then to let them go. If the work has gone well, they shouldn’t need to keep coming back. It’s a principle I won’t compromise on, even when it means a quieter diary.
I want to be open about this, because I’m sure plenty of us, whatever our income, know the rollercoaster of weeks or months when money feels tight but rarely say so out loud. There’s another reason too: the people who most need therapy are often the ones who can least afford it. That truth shapes my work, and it shapes the rhythm of my year.
The quiet truth
When the diary is full for a few weeks, my own marketing tends to slip. A lull follows, and with it comes a familiar tightening in my chest, a kind of paralysis that arrives with the money worries. I’m fortunate to be staying with my mum whilst I rebuild, and that’s a softer landing than many people get. Even so, there are fixed costs that don’t pause for a quiet month.
I’m sharing this not as a confession, but because I think those of us in the helping professions do a disservice when we polish every surface. The cycle is real. Naming it makes it less frightening, both for me and for anyone reading who’s living something similar.
What quiet months are actually for
What I’ve learned, slowly, is that these lulls aren’t empty. They’re permission to live differently. Once I get past the initial money worry, I usually find that the things I most enjoy, and the things that keep me healthiest, cost almost nothing.
Low-cost wellbeing, in practice
The gym is a good example. £35 a month gets me the lot: training, swimming, sauna. When money’s tight, I actually go more, not less, because the time costs me nothing extra. The sauna in particular has surprised me. You’re sat half-naked next to men and women of all ages and backgrounds; you’d think it’d feel awkward, but it’s the opposite. People drop the small talk quickly, and some of my closest friendships have grown out of those open chats in the heat. It beats going out drinking and spending money I haven’t got.
One of my closest friendships started in a summer when neither of us had much money. We met midweek in Liverpool and walked the docks, wandered through free museums, played tennis, made salads for each other, and took picnics to whichever park looked good that day. I can still remember the smell of cut grass and the salads we’d thrown together that morning. The whole summer barely cost us a thing. Friendship is mostly time, attention, and a packed lunch.
Liverpool’s Central Library is another favourite. It costs nothing to sit there for an afternoon, and it’s so comfortable I can lose myself in a book, fiction or non-fiction, in a way I rarely can at home. Sometimes all it takes for a book to grip me is being somewhere that won’t let me wander off.
Other days, I’ll take myself to Wetherspoons for the all-day breakfast and a coffee with unlimited refills. It gives me a few hours to stop, sit with my book, and let the morning slow down.
I also walk more in the quieter months, because I have a guide-dog foster puppy and a “god-puppy” who lives around the corner. Between them, I’m out in the fresh air a lot more than I would be otherwise. I cycle, I run, and I’m about to sign up for the 2027 Bolton Half Ironman, which will keep me training for months and costs almost nothing once the entry’s paid.
I love public speaking too. I pay my club membership twice a year, and the meetings themselves only cost me the train fare. It’s as much a social thing as anything else; I feel completely at home there, and I usually join friends at the pub afterwards. When money’s tight, a single small drink is all I need to stay in the room.
The quieter months are also when I take time to study. There’s loads of free or low-cost training online, and I’ve got piles of coaching psychology, NLP, and hypnosis material I like to revisit. Going back over older notes is a reliable way to feel I’m staying current, and I always spot angles I missed first time round. I’ll also catch up with therapy colleagues during these stretches, working through role plays and hypnosis techniques I’ve been wanting to try, ironing them out somewhere safe before I try them with a client.
Some of my most creative work has come out of these quieter months. I’m a creative person by nature, and quiet months are when I finally get to turn ideas into something real: a hypnosis audio tool here, a podcast marketing suite there, and a handful of small utilities that help my work. I’ve also made songs, rhymes, animations, and little poems, some for friends’ birthdays, others to cheer someone up when they needed it.
The pattern I’ve come to trust
Something I’ve noticed, often enough that I can’t write it off: just as I start to fret about how low the bank balance is getting, an enquiry tends to land. Usually it’s someone who’s been quietly watching my YouTube videos for a while. They book in quickly, we connect easily, and there’s no hard sell; it feels, more often than not, as though the timing was always going to work out. I don’t claim to know why that pattern holds. I’ve just learned not to panic when the diary thins, because the right people seem to find me at the right time.
What I’d like you to take from this
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: if money is tight for you right now, that’s okay. You’re not less worthy of help, and you don’t need to feel embarrassed about it. I know the territory.
If cost is what’s standing between you and the support you’d like, please get in touch and let me know your situation. I offer payment plans, and I’m building a growing set of more affordable resources. They’re not the same as one-to-one work, but they’re real and useful when budgets are tight. No judgement, no awkwardness. We may well be in similar boats.
A tight month is something many of us know, and it doesn’t have to feel like a failure. It can be a reminder of the abundance of low-cost ways to live a fulfilling life: the friendships, the walks, the books, the steady rituals. Approached that way, a low-budget month can turn out to be one of the richest you’ll have.
