The first time I tried to find a therapist for myself, in 2018, I made a spreadsheet. Columns for in-network/out, sliding scale yes/no, "specializes in" copy-pasted from Psychology Today, the photo on each listing, a personal column called do they look kind. I sent thirty-two emails. I heard back from nine. Two of those nine had openings, both on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. I worked at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays. I closed the spreadsheet.
I'm telling you this because it is the reason I took the job here. I edit this Journal. The people who started Healing Tides Collective didn't ask me to write about how they built it; I'm writing about it because, several years and several spreadsheets later, I think they got the shape right.
The shape is: not a directory.
Psychology Today has 130,000 listings or thereabouts. You can filter by a dropdown called "specializes in," which I have come to understand is a marketing field, not a clinical one — clinicians type into it whatever they think will get them clicked. The result is a kind of SEO arms race wearing a clinical cardigan. I don't blame the clinicians. I would do it too. The structure of the thing forces them into it. It also forces you, the person trying to find someone, into doing the work that the structure should be doing for you.
You become your own intake coordinator while also being the person who needs care. That is the job a directory hands you, free of charge.
What this place is, instead
A front door. That is the most useful sentence I can write about Healing Tides Collective. A front door implies a house and a person on the other side and the modest social contract of opening it when somebody knocks. It implies that there is one of it; you don't enter a house through six doors at once. You go through one. Somebody on the other side — ideally not a chatbot — helps you figure out which room you actually came for.
The rooms here are practitioners. Therapy. Acupuncture. Reiki, included on purpose, with both eyes open about how the word lands. Movement work — yoga, somatics, breath. Trauma-informed care across all of it.
What the founders chose not to build, when they built this, is also worth saying out loud. They did not build a marketplace. There are no five-star reviews on practitioners; the work of being seen by a person is not improved by stars. They did not build an algorithm. The match between a person and their care is too soft for an algorithm — it depends on the day, the room, the way somebody says hello. They built a small thing instead. A way for the right two people to find each other a few weeks earlier than they would have otherwise.
That is the whole product. I think it is enough.
A note before you knock
I won't promise you healing. The word is doing a lot of work in our cultural moment, and I'm not sure all of that work is honest. What I can promise — what the Collective can promise — is a thoughtful introduction to a person who might be the right person, and the dignity of not being asked to filter human beings by checkbox.
If you have been in the spreadsheet phase, hi. The door is right here. Knock once. Somebody will answer.