I’ve been sitting with a question lately: Why does this work feel so lonely?

Not lonely in the obvious way. My days are full of people. Deep conversations. Holding space for hard things. The intimacy of someone trusting me with their health, their fears, their hope that something might finally shift.

And yet.

There’s a particular kind of isolation that comes from relationships that only flow one direction. From being the one everyone leans on while you’re quietly wondering who you get to lean on. From having your nervous system become someone else’s regulation tool.

I started noticing it first in my patients.

The Pattern I Saw in Others

Some patients would tell me they “depended on me so much” (sometimes in the same breath as commenting on how expensive visits were). And something about that framing made me uneasy. Not because dependency is inherently wrong, but because I could feel the unspoken request. They weren’t coming to me to learn how to listen to themselves. They were coming to outsource the listening entirely.

There’s a version of the practitioner-patient relationship that’s genuinely supportive: I have knowledge and tools you don’t have access to. I can help you shortcut certain things, ask better questions, see patterns you’re too close to see. We’re partners in figuring this out. I’ve just thought about health, physiology, and healing more deeply than you’ve had reason to.

And then there’s another version. The one where I’m not helping someone find their own authority, but replacing it. Where every answer I give is another reason they don’t have to develop their own knowing. Where my giving and their taking starts to feel less like healing and more like… extraction.

I got pretty good at recognizing this dynamic. Setting clearer expectations. Asking more probing questions instead of just providing answers. Gently redirecting people back to themselves.

What I didn’t realize was that I was doing the same thing. Just in a different direction.

The Pattern I Finally Saw in Myself

Here’s the part that’s harder to write.

When I stopped over-giving to patients, the pattern didn’t disappear. It shape-shifted.

First, it showed up as credential-seeking. When I started thinking about the business side of practice, my first instinct was: maybe I should get an MBA. Not because I needed one, but because I knew how to do education. I knew that having another degree might soothe my nervous system enough to let me move forward.

Then it became coaching programs. Frameworks. Courses I bought and never finished. I invested thousands of dollars in business trainings, and the most impactful thing I learned from one of them was that my pricing needed to change.

That’s it. That one insight saved my practice.

And here’s what gets me: I could have known that myself. I had the information. I just didn’t trust that I could act on it without someone else’s permission.

That’s the thing about dependency. It’s not really about the knowledge. It’s about the permission. The external validation that says: yes, you can do this now. You have enough credentials, enough training, enough frameworks. You’re allowed. You’re good enough to do the thing you want to do.

The Shape It Takes Now

I’m still untangling this. Just recently, I caught myself in another version of the same spiral.

I was searching for ways to optimize the profitability of my practice. Should I see more patients? Fewer patients with higher prices? Group programs? Digital products? I’d have these endless circular conversations with my partner, my journal, my AI - spinning through different frameworks, different schedules, different models. Looking for the system that would finally make everything click.

I felt scattered. Overwhelmed. Like if I just looked hard enough, researched enough options, the RIGHT answer would emerge. The one perfect business model that would solve it all.

But here’s what I was missing: the right answer isn’t about a schedule or framework or model. Those are just structures. The foundation has to be something else.

And then I had a conversation with a friend who had recently reached a new level of success in her own work. I was asking her about the tactical stuff — the how. What’s your offer structure? How did you price it? What made it work?

What she shared wasn’t another framework. She talked about getting back in touch with her mission. About reconnecting with why she was doing the work in the first place. And how everything else - the structure, the pricing, the model - flowed from that clarity.

I felt something shift when she said it. Not because it was new information - I’ve learned this before, heard versions of it from coaches and frameworks. But something about hearing it from her - someone in the middle of her own figuring-out, not selling me a solution - made it land differently.

I’d been looking outside myself for THE answer. And what she reminded me was that I already have it. The answer isn’t out there in some perfect framework. It’s in reconnecting with why I’m doing this work in the first place.

What I’m Trying Instead

I’m not saying coaching is bad, or that learning from others is dependency. There’s a real difference between receiving support and outsourcing authority.

The moments that have felt genuinely supportive (not codependent, just nourishing) have a different texture. Conversations with practitioner friends where we’re figuring it out together. “How do you do this? Okay, here’s how I do it.” No one positioning themselves as the expert. Just mutual exploration, shared vulnerability, the relief of realizing we’re all improvising.

This is the kind of space I want to build: not a platform where I dispense wisdom from on high, but a place where we can think through these questions honestly. What does sustainable practice actually look like? What work are we doing that’s genuinely irreplaceable? How do we shape a better future for healthcare - both within our practices and beyond them?

My mission is that mutual exploration. Figuring out what practice looks like when it’s rooted in internal authority - not just mine, but all of ours. When helping means empowering someone to need me less, not more. When we stop looking for permission and start trusting the knowing we already have.

This is why so many of us burn out, I think. We keep sourcing our authority from outside ourselves, and then wonder why nothing regenerates.

I’ll let you know what I find.

A question to sit with:

What’s one thing you already know about your practice that you keep looking outside yourself to validate?