Guidance
How much should you say about yourself?
Enough to be a person, not so much that the page becomes about you. Where the line usually sits.
There are two versions of the therapist About page.
The first is four lines long. Qualifications, membership body, a sentence about being committed to providing a safe and confidential space. It is correct and it is completely anonymous.
The second is a thousand words about a personal turning point.
Both are written by people who find the task uncomfortable, which is most people. The first solves the discomfort by disappearing. The second solves it by over-explaining.
What the page is actually for
A prospective client is not reading your About page to learn about you. They are reading it to work out what it would be like to be in a room with you, and whether they would be able to say the thing they have not said out loud yet.
That reframes the question. It is not how much should I disclose. It is what does this person need in order to imagine the first session.
What usually helps
Something specific about the work. Not “I work with anxiety” but the shape of it — what you notice, what you tend to be interested in, what you think tends to be underneath the thing people arrive with. Two or three sentences of real thought does more than a paragraph of adjectives.
A sense of how you are. Warm, direct, quiet, dry, structured. You do not have to name it. It comes through in how the page is written, which is why an About page written in your own words beats one written to sound professional.
Something plainly human. Where you live. What you did before this, if you did something before this. A sentence that could only have been written by you. It does not need to be a revelation — the point is that somebody wrote it.
The practical facts. Training, accreditation, supervision, insurance, how long you have been practising. Stated once, without ceremony.
What usually does not
A therapeutic autobiography. Your own history of therapy, your recovery, your reason for entering the profession. Sometimes this is exactly right — practitioners working in a specific field often need to say it. But it is worth being honest about who it is for. If it is mainly there to justify your presence in the room, the page will feel like it is asking the reader for something.
A modality lecture. A prospective client does not know what integrative means, and explaining it well takes more words than the page can spare. Better: describe what you do, and name the modality once for the people who are looking for it.
Everything. The About page does not have to carry your whole professional identity. It has to get somebody to the point of sending an email.
The line, roughly
You are aiming for the amount of self-disclosure you would offer a new colleague at the end of a good first conversation. More than a CV. Less than a confidence.
A practical way to write it
Ask somebody who knows you to describe what you are like to talk to, and write the page from what they say rather than from what you think you should sound like. Most people’s own drafts are more formal, more distant and less likeable than the way they actually are.
Then read it aloud. If a sentence would be embarrassing to say to somebody sitting opposite you, it is probably a sentence written for an imagined professional audience rather than for a client.
And the photograph
Have one. It does more work than the whole page.
It does not need to be expensive, styled or flattering. It needs to look like you on an ordinary day, taken somewhere with decent light, looking at the camera. Somebody deciding whether to contact you is trying to picture a person. Give them one to picture.