Therapy for Entrepreneurs & Business Owners

Yes. Helm Psychology is a private-pay practice. When you pay privately, no diagnosis is submitted to any insurance company, and nothing about your treatment enters an insurance database or any third-party system. Your therapy is protected by the same confidentiality laws that govern all psychotherapy, staying between you and us.

That said, if you want to seek out-of-network reimbursement, just know the tradeoff first: a superbill includes a diagnosis code, and your insurer will see it. Plenty of founders skip the reimbursement for exactly that reason. But it's your call either way. There’s really no right or wrong answer, and nothing gets submitted unless you ask.

Confidentiality in therapy does have narrow legal limits that apply to everyone, such as imminent safety concerns, and we'll walk through all that together before starting. Beyond that, nobody in your cap table, company, or family hears anything from us.

Most founders we work with already have plenty of places to talk about the business: a coach, advisors, investors who mentor, maybe an EO or YPO forum. Those are genuinely useful, and we're not here to replace them.

But almost all of those relationships have something in common: the people in them have a stake in you, and there are some conflicts of interest between the professional and personal. Your investors need you confident. Your team needs you steady. Your peer group knows your reputation, and even a great coach is ultimately working on your performance. So there's a version of you that shows up in all of those rooms, and certain things understandably stay out of the conversation: the doubt, the resentment, the 3am dread, the question of whether you even want this anymore.

Therapy is the one place that has no stake in any of that. We're not invested in your company, your image, or your staying the course. That, plus legal confidentiality protections that coaching and peer groups don't have, makes it possible to look at things you can't examine anywhere else, including the personal patterns underneath how you build, push, avoid, and hold on. If it turns out the problem isn't strategy, this is where we can try to figure things out.

Not automatically. Building a business requires a level of commitment to it that outsiders can tend to misread as imbalance. It can be understandable that there’s been some fusion between your company and sense of self since that’s often exactly what helped get it off the ground. 

But where it starts costing you is when there's no version of you left outside the business. When your mood starts tracking with the company's metrics. When experiencing a bad quarter starts feeling like being a bad person, and stepping away even briefly feels terrifying. Founders often only notice this when something forces the question: a sale, a pivot, a health scare, a spouse who says they’ve had enough of waiting around for you.

Therapy isn't necessarily about loosening your commitment to what you've built. It's about making sure the person behind the business still exists apart from it, so that your sense of worth doesn't have to ride on every up and down of the company. 

No. A significant portion of our practice is founders and business owners.

Before becoming a psychologist, Dr. Annia Raja worked as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group and an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley. She's spent time inside high-stakes business environments where the dynamics are unforgiving, and she's been at the table with founders raising money and in M&A conversations about companies people built. Dr. Chaim Rochester has spent years working with executives, founders, and other people in high-stakes roles, in both therapy and coaching. 

So when you talk about runway, a co-founder falling apart, an acquisition that's dragging, or what it's like to make payroll for people whose mortgages depend on you, you won't be starting from scratch. You can spend your sessions on what's actually happening rather than on background.

Some of it, sure. Building a business without guaranteed outcomes involves real uncertainty, and a nervous system that responds to real uncertainty is working correctly. We're not going to pathologize the ordinary stress of running a company, and we're not here to make you calm about things that genuinely warrant concern.

But there's a difference between anxiety that tracks with what's actually happening versus anxiety that is just always on. When good news doesn't register for more than an hour. When you can't sleep during a quarter that's going well. When the dread is the same whether you just closed a round or just lost a customer. At that point, it isn't just information about the business anymore. It's a state you're living in, and it will follow you into the next company too.

This comes up more than most people would guess. The exit closes, the money lands, everyone congratulates you, and instead of relief, you’re feeling something flatter and harder to name. Sometimes it's grief, since the thing that organized your days and told you who you are is now gone. Sometimes it's the discovery that the exit number didn't materialize the fantasy that you assumed it would. Sometimes it's identity vertigo: you've introduced yourself the same way for a decade, but now that sentence no longer applies.

There's also the isolation of it. Complaining about life after a successful exit is socially impossible, so most founders don't, and the feelings tied to your internal experiences go underground.

We work with founders on exactly these kinds of dynamics. Some are figuring out what comes next, some are sitting with what the years of building actually cost them, and some are dealing with things they postponed while the company took everything: a marriage, their health, a version of themselves they set aside somewhere around year three.

Weekly therapy is our standard rhythm, and it's how we work with most clients. Depth-oriented therapy needs enough continuity to build on itself. With long gaps between sessions, therapy tends to stay at the surface level of updates and catching up. And some clients meet more often than weekly, whether during intensive stretches of therapy or simply because they want more room in the work.

That said, we know that some founders genuinely can't hold a standing weekly appointment, between fundraising sprints, launches, travel, and stretches where the company eats everything. This is why we also offer two therapy intensive formats as alternative time containers.

Monthly Intensive Therapy means longer sessions on a monthly or biweekly cadence: therapy still has continuity, but each meeting gives enough room to settle in and go deep, rather than trying to squeeze everything into a standard weekly session. Focused Therapy Intensives are different: a longer session, or a short series of them, built around one specific thing that needs concentrated attention. That might be a decision you've been circling, a co-founder conflict, burnout that's come to a head, or a stuck pattern you want real time with. Some founders use a Focused Therapy Intensive to start therapy with momentum, while some use it alongside ongoing work. You can read about both formats on our Therapy Intensives page.

If you're not sure what would fit with your life, that's a normal topic for us to discuss on a consult call.

Yes. Helm Psychology operates exclusively online through a secure, HIPAA-compliant platform. We're licensed in California and Texas and participate in PSYPACT, which lets us work with clients in 40+ states across the U.S.

Most of the founders we work with actually prefer it this way. No commute, and sessions can happen from your office, home, or wherever you happen to be that week. It also means therapy doesn't get interrupted by travel or a move, so your therapy can stay consistent even when nothing else is. You can read more about how depth-oriented work translates to a virtual setting on our online therapy page.

Helm Psychology is a private-pay practice. We are not in-network with any insurance companies, and we don't bill insurance directly.

For a lot of the founders we work with, that's part of the appeal. Paying privately means that no diagnosis gets submitted to an insurance company, no treatment records enter an insurance database, and no third party gets a say in how long or how deep the work goes.

That said, if your plan includes out-of-network benefits, you can still pursue them if you wish. We can provide monthly superbills, and depending on your plan, we can often submit out-of-network claims electronically on your behalf. Reimbursement rates vary a lot between plans, so it's worth asking your insurer specifically about out-of-network outpatient psychotherapy. Check our main FAQs for more detailed information on this.

One thing to know before you decide: a superbill has to include a diagnosis code, and your insurance company will see it. Some founders look at their reimbursement rate and decide it's worth it. Others would rather keep therapy completely outside the insurance system, even at a higher out-of-pocket cost. There's no wrong answer, but it should be your call, made with full information. We can go over things with you before anything gets submitted anywhere.