Radical Healership

How to Build a Values-Driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World

By: Laura Mae Northrup

Narrated by: Laura Mae Northrup

The countercultural healer’s guide for building a sustainable and values-driven practice: work toward your purpose, grow your client base, and thrive with integrity in an unjust capitalist system. The time for healing—and the time to be a healer—is now.

Therapist Laura Mae Northrup navigates the complexities of being a healer today—and shows how you can stay true to your calling in a world built from systems that were designed to extract, oppress, and exploit.

Addressing fundamental tensions that arise for practicing healers working in a late-stage capitalist culture, Northrup shares how to:

• Maintain your ethical framework even while prioritizing financial stability
• Market and brand your practice authentically, without resorting to fear-based tactics
• Recognize the unconscious biases and unexamined motivations you unintentionally bring to work
• Honor your limits within a culture that valorizes overwork and perpetuates burnout
• Prioritize your emotional needs and spiritual goals—and honor their place in your healing practice

Structured in accessible, to-the-point chapters with practical writing and reflection prompts, Northrup offers an authentic, spiritually grounded approach to healership, going much deeper than the promise of a million-dollar practice or a minimum-effort game plan.

Written for healers of all modalities—including radical therapists, functional practitioners, reiki workers, bodyworkers, and healers who have been sidelined, underfunded, underresearched, or delegitimized within a Western capitalist framework—this book offers a nuanced, political, and social-justice informed guide to building the practice you want—and thriving as the healer you were born to be.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Laura Mae Northrup (P)2022 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

"Radical Healership is the book that astrologers, tarot readers, counselors, and other healing practitioners need. It gives you good advice from an experienced healer...about what it means to heal as a job without wanting to make it a job. It is a book that embraces you." (Alice Sparkly Kat, author of Postcolonial Astrology)

"Northrup shows you how to take care of your financial, spiritual, and emotional needs as you stay true to your radical values. Get ready to feel as if you’re in a deep conversation with a wise mentor who always tells you the truth." (Annie Schuessler, host of the podcast Rebel Therapist)

"If you’re looking for an anti-oppressive, anti-capitalist, spiritually led book to help you start or build your healing arts practice, start right here." (Jennifer Patterson, author of The Power of Breathwork)

My favorite therapy book in years

I'm a psychotherapist who listens to a fair amount of audio books on this topic. The vast majority of them are either dated, or for baby therapists struggling with their own anxiety, depression, impostor syndrome, etc. (No shame in that, just not what I need after a decade plus in my career). The author is fierce, brilliant, and wise, and strikes a rare and inspiring balance between how to survive in capitalism, without losing your soul in it.

I especially liked how she contextualized our work alongside other healers, with and without official credentials. Thinking about our weird role as healers in society is so much more interesting to me these days than techniques.

Very insightful

This was such a helpful and important book as I continue my own healing journey and as I struggle to create a healing practice. Thank you. This is a book I will listen too many times. Thank you for the practices at the end of each chapter!

Life changing

As a new healer starting private practice this book was a game changer. If you are not a cookie cutter healer this book is gold!

Really important book!

As a therapist and clinical supervisor, I love this book and have encouraged new therapists that I supervise to read it, too. There is a dangerous precedent set in the field of healing arts for practitioners to be self sacrificing, help everyone, and not make money, and that needs to change. This book is very needed right now as we shift the paradigm.This isn’t your typical self-help book or guide to building a private practice or healing practice, but an invitation for a deep dive inside to ask yourself hard questions and give yourself radical permission to be unapologetically who you are. Despite being a practicing therapist for many years now, I got a lot from this book. I especially appreciated the chapter on taking a deep look at your “shadow why,” the darker, more shameful, trauma-based m, or self-serving reasons you want to be a healing professional. Without looking at our own motivations, we risk doing unconsciously harm through our healing work. This book is widely applicable to all types of healing professionals.

Compassionate & Organized!

A wealth of compassionate well delivered information for both the professional, as well as the healers in training.

Thank you for your service😁

Not what I was expecting😬

I had to stop listening! I was expecting a book that would be uplifting, inspiring and motivating. Instead she complains about our capitalistic society and seems to be more focused on the problems we face as practitioners rather than outcreating them. I’m sure this book will resonate with others but I can’t say it did with me.