[WHITNEY OWENS]
Welcome to the Faith in Practice podcast. I’m your host Whitney Owens recording live from Savannah, Georgia. I’m a licensed professional counselor, group practice owner, and private practice consultant. Each week through personal story or amazing interviews, I will help you learn how to start, grow and scale your practice from a faith-based perspective. I will show you how to have an awesome faith-based practice without being cheesy or fake. You too can have a successful practice, make lots of money, and be true to yourself.

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to listen to the Faith in Practice podcast. If you are a new listener, I’m so glad you came and I hope that you really enjoy the show. I know I enjoy making the show and I think you’ll benefit from it. So thanks for being here today. If you’re new, you’re also getting a really good episode with an interview I did with Jeff Guenther, but we’ll talk about that more in a minute. And if you’re a longtime listener, I always appreciate you. If you have time, please give me a review so I know what it is you like, and don’t like about the podcast so I can make improvements.

You’ll love listening to the episode too, where Jeff talks to me a little bit about authenticity and reviews on your podcast or in any kind of business that you have. So you’ll want to listen out for that. First part, I just want to say life is funny. Like I have to laugh because owning a business, having a consulting practice, having kids, it is all just bananas. I mean, you probably can empathize with me. So today I recorded in a place I’ve never recorded before. We are currently renting a condo. By the time this episode goes live, my life will be very different, I hope because we’re getting some stuff free, done at our house. This is the first time I’ve ever done a house redo. And don’t you sometimes feel like when it rains, pours like let’s just renovate our house and have the kids start school and make it just craziness?

So I’m in this rental and I’m up in the bedroom because I got to stay away from everybody while I’m podcasting and outside my window, I just think this is fascinating, so I’m sharing it with you, there are beehives. I live in Georgia and there’s beehives. So I’ve been watching the bees around the beehives. I’ve also seen them taking care of them, putting a covering over them, taking the covering off of them. I’ve also seen the lady mow the grass right beside the bees. She runs real fast when she gets near the bees. So it’s just kind of interesting. So sometimes we’re not really in the best situations, maybe in our practice business, family, whatever, you just have to find the joy that you can and what it is and laugh about it. So my joy here in this little room that I’m sitting in is that I get to watch the bees and it’s fun. There’s also a lot of cables up in the air. So I like to watch the birds and squirrels across them. Don’t worry. They’re totally fine.

So, all right, today I am interviewing Jeff Guenther. He is licensed professional counselor. He’s based out of Portland, Oregon, which is on my like five places I would want to live if I ever got to go live somewhere. He has a private practice since 2005. He’s the creator and owner of Portland Therapy Center. It’s a ranked therapist directory that’s for the people living in Portland. So if you are in Portland, go check that out. He’s also launched a new progressive therapist directory called therapy TherapyDen fighting racism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of discrimination. I love having him on the show because I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. It’s so important as faith-based counselors that we’re fighting for those that are not cared for, those that are marginalized, those that are bullied, those that are put on the outskirts. We need to be a voice for them and care for them. So it was one of the reasons why I thought Jeff would be great to have on the show to talk about that and the importance of authenticity in our practice.

We know as Christians that it’s really important that we don’t fake things. And it’s really easy to beat that way. Like I feel like growing up in the Bible belt, it’s easy for me to play the game of church and doing the right things and that really doesn’t help. It doesn’t get us to where we need to be as a community and as therapists. It’s when we are authentic that we can truly love people where they are, because we love where we are. So I value authenticity. I think it’s so important in our faith journey and in getting the word out about our faith and that we fight for those that have no voice.

So we’re going to talk about that on the show today. I want to encourage you if you don’t make it through the episode, which you should, but if you don’t please go check out TherapyDen. It’s so easy. Go to therapyden.com, a free profile as a therapist, tell all your friends about it. The only way that the word is going to get out about the importance of an authentic accepting profile is if you all go do it. So make a difference, take 10 minutes, make your profile, share it with other people, post on your social media tag TherapyDen, “Hey, I made my profile. You should too.” It’s that simple. So I have a profile. Every therapist in my practice has a profile. So I hope that you could take the time to do that. So anyway, we are going to go ahead and jump into this interview with Jeff Guenther, who is the creator of TherapyDen.
[WHITNEY]
Today on the Faith in Practice podcast, I have Jeff Guenther here to hang out with me. How are you doing today, Jeff?
[JEFF GUENTHER]
I’m doing really good. How are you?
[WHITNEY]
I’m good. The first thing I want to say here is Portland is on my list of places I would move to if I had to move somewhere.
[JEFF]
I support that. Portland is wonderful. I’ve lived here for 15 years. I grew up in LA. No, I’ve been here for 16 years. However, today this week we’re experiencing a heat wave and that’s supposed to get up to 108 degrees, which maybe you can tolerate being from Georgia. Does it get up to that that hot over there?
[WHITNEY]
No, now we have awful humidity. So it makes it feel worse than it really is. It’s dryer there, right?
[JEFF]
It’s a dry heat. So when it gets up to like 108 degrees, it’s not swampy, but it feels like there’s some needles that are being thrown at your skin all day long, which is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as being in the humidity.
[WHITNEY]
I actually lived in Colorado for a few years. So I used to always chalk it up to being closer to the sun. Yes, I can tolerate the shade if it was a hot day in Colorado, but here, no, there’s no escaping the nastiness.
[JEFF]
But usually it’s pretty gloomy and a little drizzly and we’re covered by clouds for, I don’t know, eight months out of the year. So it feels real cozy, but it’s also good for business and that like, it makes you feel really sad and all those —
[WHITNEY]
I was going to say that.
[JEFF]
All those sad folks come back in. So it’s summertime. So everybody thinks that they’re happy. They’re not. They get real sad once those parts come back.
[WHITNEY]
It’s true. I’ve also heard places with high humidity are prone to mental health issues, especially anxiety. Like even that deep breath, like it’s harder to breathe and acclimate.
[JEFF]
Yes. Portland and Seattle, the Pacific Northwest has like the highest prescription rate for antidepressants. So we’re a sad bunch over here, but we also really enjoy going to therapy and there’s not a lot of stigma and it’s really celebrated. So yes, I love Portland. You should visit.
[WHITNEY]
Oh, awesome. Well, I’ll let you know if I make my way out there at some point. Will you share with us a little bit about yourself, how you got into the mental health field, and I know you have a private practice?
[JEFF]
Yes. Like I said, I grew up in LA. My mom was a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles. So there’s a few other therapists in the family. It kind of runs in the family. I tried to not get into it and rebel against it, but it was just in my blood. So I got my graduate degree from USC down in Los Angeles in marriage, family therapy, moved up to Oregon back in 2005 and I started my private practice about 15, 16 years ago. We used to just see children and families, did top parenting classes and focused on talking to middle schoolers, started to get a little annoyed with the parents, so I stopped seeing parents and families and started seeing individuals and couples. And that’s what I still see today.
[WHITNEY]
Oh, I love that you just said that. I was just texting somebody today. She was asking me some questions about our practice and I was like, you got to do what works. And when I started, I saw adolescents, because it worked and I needed to build a caseload, but then as soon as I bought my caseload, gone for the adolescents and dealing with their parents. So I did the same thing.
[JEFF]
Yes. And now the clients I see are mostly individuals in their twenties and thirties and forties, maybe struggling with like anxiety in their relationships or existential stuff. And I see couples, but I only see couples that are stone love. So the couples that are new couples, premarital counseling, and get into fun fights. I don’t want to see the couples that are coming in and they haven’t talked for five years or haven’t had sex for three years, or they’re just like 25 years of resentment. Get out of my office. I don’t want to deal with that. There’s like some very skilled therapists that are much better with giving you treatment. So I know exactly what my niche is and I’m very excited in treating those clients.
[WHITNEY]
That’s so important. I’m totally going to go on a tangent for just a second. Your mother was seeing people in LA, so did she see famous people or do you even know?
[JEFF]
I don’t think she has seen famous people. I’m also not quite sure if she would tell me.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Well, the reason I bring this up is do you know Tony Hale, the actor, Arrested Development?
[JEFF]
I do.
[WHITNEY]
So my crazy story is I met him in person. This was, I don’t know, 10, 12 years ago, his mother, I might get this part wrong, but there was some kind of connection to a church that my friend attended and he was like, you got to come here. Tony Hale speaks. So I have a picture with them, maybe I’ll like, get it for the show notes, but I had a picture with them and I said, I’m a therapist, because he was very friendly and he goes, oh, you’re a therapist. If you ever meet with actors, do not let them talk about themselves. That is the worst part. Treatment comes when they learn not to talk about themselves. And I’m like, all right, duly noted.
[JEFF]
Yes. I love that. Tony Hale’s great. And that’s probably really good advice for actors in the industry.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. He’s wonderful. All right. So tell us, so you’ve got your private practice and you started an online directory called TherapyDen, can you kind of talk about the story of starting that?
[JEFF]
Sure. Yes, it actually started with me renting part-time office space in Portland. So I’m like renting office space to new therapists, helping them launch their practices. I started to build a website just for those therapists to help market their services. That turned into a local therapist directory for Portland that you can find at portlandtherapycenter.com. And I learned a ton building that directory, getting feedback from the community, clients that are looking for therapists and therapists that want to build out their profiles. And then in about 2017, I started to build TherapyDen with a very small team and it launched in 2018. TherapyDen is a national therapist directory that’s kind of like a response to the Psychology Today directory, which I’m not a huge fan of.

TherapyDen is very inclusive and progressive and open to everybody and as for social justice and racial justice and wants to fight homophobia and transphobia, and it encourages therapists, when they sign up for their profile to be very authentic with who they are, which I know is like, can still like really ruffle feathers. Because a lot of times when we go through grad school, we’re told not to be very authentic or personal in our marketing or in our therapy. But I wanted to kind of like try to move the industry forward just because there was a ton of clients during the therapist directories in Portland and in TherapyDen where they’re just like, who are these therapists? Who are you? So I’m just like, okay, I’m going to build a directory that’s going to feature a therapist and ask them to be more authentic. It’s still totally up to the therapist, how authentic or how personal they want to be in their profiles, but I’m trying to like nudge them forward.
[WHITNEY]
I love that you just brought this up the importance of authenticity of the therapist because yes, we learned in school not to be that, but if we’re not authentic, then what are we doing in therapy? Like therapy is about relationship.
[JEFF]
Yes, exactly. And it’s funny. I was on my lawn, was walking my dog this morning and I was kind of scrolling through your podcasts and one of the things, there’s something about your podcasts that feels inauthentic to me. But it’s not your fault, I don’t think. But when you look at your podcast, you can see the reviews and you have all five star reviews. Do you know this?
[WHITNEY]
Actually, I looked at it yesterday.
[JEFF]
It’s incredibly impressive and I love that for you but it got me thinking that whenever I’m like looking for a restaurant on Yelp or Google or whatever, and the restaurant has a five-star review and no negative reviews, I’m like, I don’t know if I trust this. I think they just have like a wonderful fan base that loves your content. So of course, you’re going to rate you a five stars. We’ll see if we can change that today with me on your podcast, but, I don’t know, have you ever thought about your five star reviews and how perfect it is?
[WHITNEY]
Yes, so I had not thought of that. The reason that I just looked at it the other day was I was doing some consulting around Google My Business and the importance of getting reviews. And I was like, well, you can’t ask clients for it, but you can encourage people to just write reviews. So, yes, I ask people to write reviews, but I’d probably ask people that already love me. So then I’m asking them to write the review. And I did get a lot of reviews at the beginning. I would say like the first 70 or 80 reviews was just people that were my friends and family that I said, “I’m starting a podcast. Please give me reviews so it’ll get a lot of hits.” It was part of it, but we know that all good therapists and all good professionals get a bad review at some point. So I’m sure it’s coming and I’ll take comfort in our conversation when it happens that maybe it’s actually going to help me.
[JEFF]
Yes. It lends some more authenticity or credibility. Now, again, I’m not saying that you deserve less than a five star review. You deserve all the stars. But it was just something funny that kind of like popped out to me and it made me start to think about like going through graduate school, and maybe you experienced this too, or maybe dependent on the program that you went to, but the, at USC, in my graduate school, there was very DSME medical model. You know, you are a blank slate. So it also felt a little bit Freudian sometimes by being like just let the client talk and don’t talk about yourself. So I was told that like you’ll get too personal, you might scare clients away, you might take focus off the client if you reveal something about yourself, whether it’s through your website or TherapyDen profile or in therapy and that the client will it just might feel weird.

And I think part of that goes into like, what’s your niche and it’s totally okay and encouraged to advertise and market to your niche. So you might have to be a little bit more authentic in your marketing. Another part of that is like, yes, maybe the client might feel a little funky if they know that you voted for Bernie Sanders. I love Bernie Sanders. I voted for Bernie Sanders. That’s been in some of my blogs and some of my clients might read my blogs and know that I voted for Bernie Sanders and they’re going to come in and they’re going to be like, oh, we need to talk about this because some of my clients who voted for Elizabeth Warren were not super excited that I’ve voted for Bernie Sanders. And there’s a lot that you can dive into as a therapist with your client when you talk about how maybe there’s a mismatch there.
[WHITNEY]
That’s right. Because regardless if you say it or not, it’s in the room.
[JEFF]
Exactly.
[WHITNEY]
The client might not know. So yes, sometimes it’s good for them not to know, but in a lot of times you’re naturally going to bring it out. Like I think about even my own therapy, I’ve had times where my therapist has been like, I’m so sorry, I am distracted today because this and this is going on and I just want to let you know this. And I’m like, thank you, instead of pretending, like it’s absolutely nothing. So who we vote for in our political views, like we hope it doesn’t make it in the room with the client, but naturally it’s going to sometimes, and we need to acknowledge that and be real about it.
[JEFF]
Yes. So, and it’s obviously, like I said, it’s up to the therapist to decide how transparent they want to be. I’m somebody that’s pretty transparent in my blogs and you’ll see that if you’re like with TherapyDen or on my TherapyDen newsletter. And it’s okay. I’m open to ruffling feathers and I know that sometimes my clients might come across some of my blog content. And I want to be really authentic and upfront with who I am and my clients are actually attracted to that. And there’s sort of this trend that maybe you and all of your listeners are seeing, what’s been happening over the last few years, two years, that clients or people that are making purchases, want to know who you are and what you stand for, whether you’re a brand or an actual person, because there’s so much connection that happens there.

And they actually can feel a lot more comfortable knowing that you believe in justice and fairness and equality and inclusivity, and that that’s reflected in your practice or that you are very faith-based and that direct some of your counseling and your treatment is going to make them feel really comfortable. In TherapyDen when you fill out your profile, you can choose all the different faiths that you are comfortable with and that you practice from everywhere, from Buddhism to Christianity, to atheism, because atheism is faith, I don’t know if that should, maybe the atheists act like it’s a faith. But there’s lots of different ways that you can categorize herself on TherapyDen and I encourage everyone to do that in their marketing.
[WHITNEY]
Now I am curious about this, so I’m going to go backwards a little bit. You are not a fan of Psychology Today. Can we talk about that?
[JEFF]
Sure. I’d love to talk about that, although I’m going to try to like not be as crazy about it. I can really go off on Psychology Today. But Psychology Today, so something that I just think is spunky and doesn’t sit right, is that Psychology Today, the directory is based in the Cayman Islands and it makes it, and when you have a business that’s based in the Cayman Islands, most likely you’re not paying your taxes. So they’re this company that makes a lot of money off of therapists in this country and it seems like they don’t pay any taxes, any of like their American taxes. So that’s upsetting and I would like to give money to companies that pay taxes here in this country.

There’s that but there’s other bigger issues like the Psychology Today magazine. I’ve written an article on this and we can link to it in the show notes. I just recently, a few weeks ago did like an updated research on the Psychology Today magazine and the cover models that they put on their magazine is predominantly white people, white women, white thin sort of like “beautiful women” that they put on the covers. It’s not diverse. It doesn’t feel inclusive. These models are cover models. That’s exactly what they are. So you’d think that like a mental health magazine that is appealing to people would have lots of different types of diverse people and bodies on there. Every single time there is a thin person. They’ve never had a person that’s in a bigger body. So just like that, right there is very upsetting and bothersome.

All that to say, like there has, a couple of years ago, or maybe it was a year, now a couple of years ago, you were able to, when you go to the Psychology Today directory, you can filter for therapists that were men or women. You weren’t able to like filter for therapists that are non-binary. Sure. TherapyDen and some other folks created a petition to try to get Psychology Today to change and they did change. They added the non-binary gender so that you can filter for that now. So if you do push against them a bit, then sometimes there is change and I’m really happy about that, but the place that like hits them the hardest is usually in their pocketbook. So if you go ahead and delete your Psychology Today profile and sign up for other therapist directories like TherapyDen, which is actually free, then you can boost other therapists directories and Psychology Today can start to get the message and maybe they can start to evolve.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. I appreciate you saying that about the magazine. I don’t even look at it a second it comes and I’m just like, ah. But now I’m really going to start paying attention. So I appreciate that you brought that up. Isn’t there something, I’m going to sound so uneducated, but I’m just going to ask you something about the algorithm with Psychology Today that is not inclusive or something like that?
[JEFF]
I don’t know a ton about that, but I have heard people talking about that. So since I don’t know enough about it, I probably shouldn’t speak to it. There’s a lot of really weird, random things about that directory that if you just Google it and see all the criticisms, it starts to feel kind of funky. They’ve had a monopoly on the business. It’s time to like spread the wealth and boost other therapists directories.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. Well, I appreciate you saying that and obviously that’s exactly what TherapyDen does. Is there anything else that you can kind of share with us about TherapyDen that would be helpful for therapists to know?
[JEFF]
Yes, so, like I said, TherapyDen is totally free and it’s been online for about three years now. Like I said, we’re trying to go up against the big guys, like Psychology Today or Good Therapy. So we need thousands and thousands of therapists to sign up. We already have many thousands that have signed up. So we’re really excited about that. If you want to have a premium profile, you can upgrade to a premium profile and it’s sort of like we’re retreating premium profiles, you’ll get ranked higher and you can like be licensed, you can attract more people in different states if you’re licensed in different states, if you have a premium profile. But you can choose how much you want to pay, 10, 20 or $30 a month. So it’s a sliding scale, just like we have for all of our clients. And there’s lots of different opportunities to blog and it’s just a game. It’s also, I’m the person that’s created TherapyDen and if you think that something needs to be added to it or something is missing, you can email me at [email protected] and be like, “Hey Jeff, what’d you add this?’ Most likely I will, if there’s something that important that’s missing.

That’s in contrast to sites like Psychology Today, where you can email them, I guess, but they will probably never get back to you. And who knows who that person is. So like, I am preaching about authenticity, I’m totally authentic about who I am and TherapyDen is. Our values are justice, fairness, equality, inclusivity. I’m also really transparent about the fact that I am like a guy that has all of the privileges, every single privilege out there. I was very lucky to get them all. I’m straight, white man that grew up in like a middle upper class socioeconomic class. So I have to be very aware of that and get feedback from a diverse therapist population that’s going to call me out when it feels like I’m blind about something or I’m doing a micro-aggression or something I’m doing, doesn’t quite sit right. So TherapyDen is growing, it’s becoming really popular, like you mentioned earlier to me in Georgia. So yes, so that’s TherapyDen.
[WHITNEY]
Wonderful. Is there anything else that therapists can do to help support TherapyDen other than creating their profiles?
[JEFF]
Yes, I mean, the number one thing that they can do is create a profile and then share with their colleagues that they just signed up for TherapyDen, so link to their profile, go ahead and promote TherapyDen and your TherapyDen profile and all of your private, like therapist groups, or listers and ask other people to sign up. The more therapists sign up the higher we rank in Google, and then the better chance we have to kind of like take over Psychology Today’s listings. So just spreading the word is the best thing to do. There’s also, I produce a podcast called Swoon, Swoon Love Lessons for Gina and Julie. They talk, we talk about like relationship problems and sex problems and we have callers call in to ask questions and it’s a really fun podcast.
[WHITNEY]
Oh, wow. I’m going to have to check that out. It sounds fun. All right, so if somebody is listening and they’re thinking, okay, I want to sign up, get my profile going with TherapyDen, do you recommend they do the free version or do you feel like the paid versions are more helpful and how would somebody know what level to do?
[JEFF]
I recommend just doing the free version for now unless you’re a therapist that’s licensed in multiple states. Then you should have a premium profile so you can list all the states that you’re licensed in so you can show up in search results for different states. Or if you want to get a boost, you’ll get at least two times the amount of profile views because you’ll be moved to the top of search results for people that are looking for online therapists in your state. So if you want to get that boost, go ahead.

But the reason it’s free is one, it sort of matches our values, which is inclusivity and fairness. So if you can’t pay, if you’re just starting out or you just want to see how it works, if it can work for you, then go ahead and create a free profile. You get like almost every single feature on there. And also we’re really just trying to create a user base right now. We just want as many therapists to sign up and to have the least amount of friction. In order to do that, then it’s going to be free. But if you support what we’re doing and you want us to continue to grow and pay for marketing, then a monthly premium subscription is very much loved. So please do that.
[WHITNEY]
Awesome. Yes, well, when we get off of this, I’m going to contact my marketing director. She has a profile for every person in the practice. I just feel like that allows you to get more hits than just doing one for your group. So each person, because we’re all unique in what we do, and so I’ll be reaching out to her to tell her to be blast in this a little bit more.
[JEFF]
Thank you.
[WHITNEY]
Yes. All right. So I think I might’ve mentioned this to you, but I forgot to tell you right before we got on, so take a moment, if you need to. I’m going to ask you what I ask everyone that comes on the show, what do you believe every Christian counselor needs to know?
[JEFF]
I mean, so I’m not like steeped in the Christian counselor faith-based community. So maybe this is something that you all are very proud of and do all the time. I would say, I’m kind of echoing what I’ve already been saying, lead with your values. You have some amazing, strong, important, awesome values, and those values match what a therapist should be and what we all should be striving for. So don’t be coy about it. Don’t be secretive about it. Be loud and proud about your faith-based values and lead with that in your marketing. And I don’t know if this is, like I said a little bit before in this podcast, the more you focus and niche down on who your demographic is, the more clients you’re going to attract to your practice. And you’re not just going to attract those specific clients. You’re going to attract other ones too. But when you get really specific about your values and who you are your practice will, in my opinion, what I’ve seen, will just start booming. So don’t be afraid of who you are, lead with them, lead with your values, and I think they’ll be a really good.
[WHITNEY]
Awesome. Now, if somebody is listening and they want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?
[JEFF]
You can email me directly at [email protected]. You can find TherapyDen on all the socials like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. And of course you can go to therapyden.com to learn more about the therapist directory and sign up for a profile.
[WHITNEY]
Awesome. Well, Jeff, this has been so much fun talking with you and I’m so glad we’re getting the word out to so many therapists. If you’re listening, stop what you’re doing or make time in your schedule to get on TherapyDen. It doesn’t take long and it’ll really help out the counseling community. So thank you again for coming on the show.
[JEFF]
Thanks for having me here.
[WHITNEY]
Thank you for listening to the Faith in Practice podcast. If you love this podcast, please rate and review on iTunes or your favorite podcast player. If you liked this episode and want to know more, check out the Practice of the Practice website. Also there, you can learn more about me, options for working together, such as individual and in group consulting, or just shoot me an email, [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.