One Year In Private Practice: What Rowe Therapy Has Taught Me

Yesterday, on 4 September, Rowe Therapy turned one!

One year in private practice. A year supporting people through some of the hardest, and often the most important, explorations of their lives — in a space designed to feel calm, safe, and entirely without pressure.

My practice didn't happen overnight. I trained as a counsellor over three years, and started seeing clients partway through, as part of a supervised placement (working with clients while closely supported by an experienced therapist). After qualifying, I spent a further year working within a community counselling charity, seeing clients under regular supervision — a normal, ongoing part of ethical counselling practice, where a more experienced therapist and I meet to make sure I'm always working in the best way I can for the people I see. Only after this did I think about opening my own doors.

Rowe Therapy the practice is one year old. The experience behind it isn't. The training, the supervision, and the hours spent sitting with people go back much further than twelve months — so if you've ever wondered whether to trust someone whose practice is still fairly new, I hope that helps answer it.

One candle, one cake — kindly baked by a friend — to mark Rowe Therapy's first birthday.

What one year in private practice actually teaches you

Here's what this first year has genuinely taught me — not as a business lesson, but as things I think shape how I show up, session after session.

Imposter syndrome is real, even when you're properly qualified for exactly this — and I'd guess a fair few of you reading this know some version of that feeling too. 

There were moments, especially early on, of quietly questioning myself — wondering if I was really ready to do this without an agency's name behind me. That questioning isn't a weakness. If you recognise that same feeling in yourself, whatever you're facing, it isn't one in you either. Sometimes that voice is exactly what pushes us to look closer, learn more, and grow into whatever we're doubting we can do.

What helped wasn't waiting for the doubt to disappear. It was using that uncertainty productively: more CPD (continuing professional development — ongoing training counsellors do throughout their careers), more reading, deliberately building knowledge rather than just hoping confidence would arrive on its own. It did, eventually, but it came from acceting myself, my skills, and continuing to do the work.

Private practice doesn't run on a schedule anyone can fully control, and letting go of needing it to was a real adjustment. 

My working life before this was based around client and project management in a marketing agency — a world built on plans, deadlines, and visible progress. Person-centred counselling (where the pace and direction of our work together is led by you, not by me) doesn't work that way, and it shouldn't.

Client numbers ebb and flow around holidays and life in general, and more importantly, it's never anyone's place but the client's to decide when their work is finished. That's a choice made at your own pace, whenever it feels right to you. Learning to sit comfortably with that uncertainty was one of the bigger adjustments of this first year — and it's exactly the flexibility that means no client of mine need ever feel rushed toward an ending before they're ready for it.

Nobody hands you a support network — you have to build one on purpose. 

Working within a charity, supervision and colleagues were simply part of the structure around you. On your own, that structure doesn't exist unless you create it yourself. This year meant being deliberate about staying connected — proper supervision, but also the relationships kept up with people I trained alongside, and network groups joined with counsellors who are more experienced, or who work in different ways entirely (different therapeutic approaches, called modalities). That breadth shapes what I can offer to clients in the room, as much as it's ever just been about having good company along the way.

Learning from others is different from comparing yourself to them, and this year was about properly telling the two apart. 

Early on, there was a pull to wonder whether I was doing this "right" compared to how other counsellors describe their own approach. What's changed isn't a stop to learning from the people around me — if anything, those network groups and old training relationships teach me something new fairly often. It's learning to take what's useful from that and still trust my own voice in the room, rather than quietly becoming a version of someone else. This work only really works when it's genuinely me sitting there, informed by others but not shaped into someone else's shape.

What hasn't changed

Through all of that, the actual heart of the work has stayed exactly the same as it was on day one: showing up, listening properly, and trusting that people generally know more about their own lives than anyone else could give them credit for. Whatever else has shifted this year — confidence, routines, how uncertainty gets held — the hour spent with a client hasn't needed reinventing. If anything, everything else learned this year has just made it easier to protect that hour and keep it exactly as steady as it needs to be.

If you're weighing up whether to start therapy with someone whose practice is only a year old: the newness is mine to manage, not something you need to carry. What happens in the room is built on far more than twelve months.

Looking toward year two

There's no tidy resolution for what year two should look like, and after this first year, that feels genuinely fine. Training continues — the somatic therapy work currently underway is already changing how I listen — and from January 2027, that training extends into couples therapy, which I'm genuinely looking forward to. It should mean being able to support people not just individually, but alongside a partner, when that's what's actually needed.

Beyond that, I'll keep leaning on the supervision and peer relationships built this year rather than assuming I should have it all figured out alone, and I'm happy to let the rest unfold the way this work always has: at the pace that's actually right, not the one that might have been planned for on a spreadsheet a year ago.

If you've been one of the people who's sat with me this year — thank you. Genuinely. Whether we worked together for one session or many, you've shaped this first year every bit as much as anything learned along the way.

Here's to year two.