When Freeze Is Your Default State (and You Still Have a Practice to Run)

Jamie Letcher • December 7, 2025

A Gentle Guide for Therapists Navigating Private Practice with a Dysregulated Nervous System

A overwhelmed Canadian therapist sitting at her desk with her face in her hands, reflecting private practice burnout, admin overload, and freeze response.

If your body goes straight into freeze the moment you open your laptop, you don’t need a lesson on why. You probably already understand how your nervous system responds to stress, your own trauma patterns, your own executive functioning challenges, all of it. You’ve explained it to clients hundreds of times.

What’s harder is naming what it feels like as the therapist, when you’re the one sitting in shutdown with a pile of work waiting for you between and after sessions.

We know about the emails you keep snoozing, the meetings you've been rescheduling, the accounts receivable you’ve been avoiding all year (and suddenly it’s December), the intake form you meant to update months ago, the client who hasn’t paid for their last two sessions, the client who hasn’t shown up for their last two sessions... we work with therapists just like you every day.

We know that you know exactly what’s happening internally… and yet it doesn’t make it easier to push through. And honestly? You shouldn’t have to push through alone.

Freeze hits differently when you’re running the entire business side of your practice (especially when this wasn’t exactly covered in your Master’s training 👀). It shows up as:

➪ staring at your screen but not being able to start

➪ knowing what to do but feeling physically unable to begin

➪ shutting down when something feels unclear or too big

➪ doing absolutely everything except the one task you need to do

➪ cycling between overwhelm and guilt

➪ feeling behind even when you’re doing your best

We hope, if you're reading this, that you remember none of this makes you less competent as a clinician. It just means you’re human in a job that kind of demands superhuman levels of organization, energy, emotional labor, and executive functioning.

And when you’re navigating your own healing, your own neurodivergence, your own mental health, your own life... the business side of private practice can feel like its own full-time job layered on top of another full-time job. Capacity, of course, isn’t a moral issue.

And yet, so many therapists sit alone with this! The shame, the backlog, the “I’ll deal with it tomorrow,” the fear that someone will somehow discover just how behind you feel. But there’s nothing to be ashamed of. This is not a character flaw. This is what happens when a dysregulated nervous system meets a role that expects you to be the clinician, business operator, admin team, digital marketer, social media manager, bookkeeper, tech support, and customer service department at once.

Your job already asks you to hold so much emotional space already, and running a business is an entire job on top of that (one that’s hard even for the most regulated among us!). Some days your system simply doesn’t have the bandwidth for both.

You can be an extraordinary therapist and still completely freeze at the thought of updating your policies or sending out five overdue emails. You can be deeply competent in the room and still shut down trying to draft a fee increase announcement. You can care about your clients with your whole heart and still avoid your accounts receivable like it’s a haunted basement.

Being a therapist doesn’t make you immune to this 😉 You deserve support for this part, too!

You Deserves a Job That Doesn’t Burn You Out, Too

When your practice is built on snoozed email reminders, post-it notes, mental to-do lists, and “I’ll get to it later,” but later never comes, then it might be time to bring in some support.

Your practice becomes easier to manage when:

➪ you have clear systems for intake, billing, scheduling, follow-ups, reminders

➪ your inbox is organized in a way that actually works for your brain

➪ your policies are written down, easy to find, and already being followed

➪ money conversations aren’t last-minute or panic-driven

And maybe when you’re not the one doing everything yourself.

➪ Optional, but Helpful: you have a specialized VA (Virtual Assistant) handling the things for you like answering emails, returning calls, sending reminders and follow-ups, getting your accounts receivable under control, managing direct billing, following up on outstanding payments, supporting you with social media, etc.

Remember: ✨ running your private practice doesn't need to look the way it does on Instagram✨

1. It's normal to need support.

2. All of our clients feel like they're behind.

3. You're allowed to set your practice up in a way that works for you, so your body doesn’t go into shutdown every time you open Jane or check your voicemail.

The therapists we work with often need infrastructure. And honestly, so do I.

I’m a neurodivergent business owner myself, so I’m no stranger to freeze, shutdown, overwhelm, or the thousand tiny executive functioning demands baked into running a business. I know what it’s like to stare at your screen, want to move, and still feel stuck. I know how much effort it takes to run a successful practice when your nervous system doesn’t operate on a clean, linear timeline.

Thankfully, I don’t do it alone anymore. I have support, and a team who helps me stay organized, anchored, and accountable in ways my brain doesn’t naturally do on its own (or tries to anyway… shoutout to our Agency Administrator, Marly!).

And this is where support becomes less of a luxury and more of a lifeline (not because you can’t run your practice, but because you shouldn't have to white-knuckle it alone!).

Support could look like:

➪ someone checking the inbox so it doesn’t get full and overwhelm you

➪ someone following up on payments so you don't have to have awkward billing conversations with clients or wait on hold with insurance programs

➪ someone keeping your schedule running even when you’ve had a difficult session day

➪ someone making sure reminders go out so clients actually show up

➪ someone organizing your workflow so nothing depends on you remembering it later

➪ someone breaking down big, blurry tasks into small, doable pieces

➪ someone who understands the nature of this job and this work

A good VA gets curious about:

➪ how your brain works

➪ what you need prioritized and off your plate

➪ what kind of reminders help you, not stress you

➪ how you prefer to communicate

We like to think that our job is to help you build a practice that feels safe to run.

So many therapists don’t realize how much lighter their practice can feel until they finally have someone in their corner; someone holding the behind-the-scenes weight with them instead of watching them carry it all alone.

You Deserve a Practice That Supports You Too

Your practice shouldn’t run on shame, panic, freeze, or last-minute scrambles, but on systems, compassion, and support that honours the way your nervous system actually works.

If you want guidance, structure, a regulated workflow, or simply someone to help you carry the pieces that exhaust you… that’s what we do every day at Wellnix.

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