By Dr. Carolyn Solo
When Carly Costello started her private practice five years ago, she didn’t have a plan. She got the LLC. She credentialed with insurance panels. A grad school friend called her and ended up becoming her first hire. She rented offices, then bought them. She hired more therapists. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, she realized she wanted to do something else, too.
That’s how EMDR With Carly was born.
In episode 153 of the Future Template Parent podcast, I sat down with Carly, an EMDR therapist, EMDR consultant, group practice owner, and founder of one of the most recognized consultation brands in the EMDR world. She’s also a mom with ADHD, pregnant with her second child, and, as of recently, a landlord.
We talked about what it actually looks like to build a consultation business when nobody teaches you how. And I think you’re going to find a lot of yourself in this conversation.
Why She Created Two Separate Brands
One of the smartest things Carly did was separate her clinical practice from her consultation work entirely. Different LLC, different website, different Instagram. At first, she wasn’t sure if that was necessary. But once she made the decision, everything clicked.
Her group practice, The Counseling Nook, runs on insurance. It’s stable, it’s meaningful, and it has real limits built into it. There’s only so creative you can get with offers when you’re working within insurance structures.
Her consultation business is completely private pay. And that, she told me, is what lit her up in a different way.
“Having the consultation business being only private pay and different work, it just felt like I can be totally creative with this,” she said. “Where growing my group practice lights me up, because we’re taking insurance, it does feel sort of trapping. There’s just limits.”
That distinction matters. When you’re building a second income stream, you want to understand not just what it is, but how it feels. A consultation business can give you the creative latitude that clinical work sometimes can’t. And that energy is what sustains you when it gets hard.
The Gap Nobody Is Filling
Carly noticed something early in her career: most therapists who complete EMDR basic training don’t actually use it.
They get scared. They don’t know where to start. The hours required to finish basic training often aren’t even scheduled into the training itself. And between that confusion and the fear that something could go wrong, a lot of therapists just quietly stop.
In her own basic training cohort in West Virginia, only Carly and one other therapist went on to get certified. Everyone else dropped off.
“I’m like, why?” she told me. And the answer she kept coming back to was the same: there’s a support gap.
That’s the gap EMDR With Carly exists to fill. Through her CIT Collective, low-ticket workshops, and consultation offerings, Carly is specifically targeting the therapists who got trained and got scared. The ones who are sitting on a powerful skill they haven’t used because they didn’t have enough support to feel confident doing it.
If you’ve invested in EMDR training, she wants you to use it. I agree.
Juggling Everything, and Learning to Juggle Less
Carly used to hold 20 clients a week. On top of running a group practice. With ADHD.
Something had to change.
She worked her way down to 10, then to 5, and now she’s stopping clinical work entirely before her second baby arrives. She’ll take the rest of the year off and come back in January with a plan to offer only EMDR intensives.
That’s a massive shift. And it took a lot of mindset work to get there.
She talked about the way she tends to hold herself to a standard she doesn’t apply to anyone else. The idea that if she’s not at the office or working, she’s somehow failing her team. That she needs to be present for everything, always.
She’s working on it. In therapy, with her business coach, in real time.
“I’m giving myself permission,” she said. “It’s okay to shift. And it doesn’t mean that I’ll be like this forever.”
That sentence is worth sitting with. A lot of us have made decisions about who we are in our business that we’ve never revisited. The mom who doesn’t take time off. The therapist who always has a full caseload. The entrepreneur who says yes first and figures it out later.
Those versions of ourselves were built in a particular season. They’re allowed to change.
Using Instagram to Build a Consultation Business
Carly is one of the clearest examples I know of what Instagram can do for a consultation business. She was named EMDRIA’s social media influencer of the year in 2025 and has built a following of EMDR therapists who trust her, learn from her, and hire her.
But her advice is a little more nuanced than “just post more.”
For her clinical practice, Instagram isn’t really the primary driver. Clients come through SEO, word of mouth, and local community presence. That’s how it works in private practice, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But for her consultation business? Instagram is everything. Because consulting doesn’t have state lines. It doesn’t depend on being local. Anyone with a phone, anywhere in the world, can find her content and decide they want to work with her.
“A consultation business, you don’t have the restrictions of your license and your state,” she said. “And everyone all over the world is on Instagram.”
That’s the unlock. If you’re building something beyond your clinical practice, social media isn’t just nice to have. It’s the thing that removes the ceiling.
Pregnancy as a Strategic Reset
There’s something Carly said that I’ve been thinking about ever since we recorded.
She had known for a while that she wanted to stop seeing individual clients. She’d been moving in that direction, slowly. But she hadn’t actually done it. And part of what finally gave her permission to stop was getting pregnant.
“I was waiting. I’m just gonna wait till I get pregnant and have maternity leave as my excuse, because I need that help.”
I don’t think that’s weakness. I think that’s honesty.
Sometimes we need an external reason to do what we already know we need to do. A season of life. A transition. A change that forces our hand. I used my own pregnancies as reset points too. Times when I could look at my practice and my schedule and my goals and say, okay, what do I actually want this to look like when I come back?
Carly is doing that now. She’s coming back in January with a version of her work that fits the life she’s building.
That’s not quitting. That’s designing.
What I Want You to Take From This Episode
You don’t have to be a planner to build something. Carly is the first to tell you she isn’t one. She built her practice, her consultation business, her brand, and her team step by step, decision by decision, without a roadmap.
What she had was a willingness to try the next thing when the time was right. To separate the brands when it felt clear. To step back when her body and her life were telling her to. To give herself permission to shift.
That’s something you can do too.
If you’re an EMDR therapist, I want you to know that there is support out there for the post-training gap. Carly is building it. I’m part of it. Find your consultant. Get the hours. Use your training.
And if you’re a therapist mom trying to figure out how to hold everything at once, I want you to know that the juggle doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You’re allowed to set things down. You’re allowed to redesign.
You’re allowed to shift.
Key Takeaways
- You don’t need a perfect roadmap to build a successful business.
- Separating clinical and consultation businesses can create more flexibility and creative freedom.
- There is a significant support gap for therapists who complete EMDR training but don’t feel confident using it.
- Your business and clinical schedule are allowed to change as your life changes.
- Social media can be a powerful growth channel for consultation businesses that aren’t limited by geography.
- You are allowed to step back, redesign your practice, and build work that fits the life you actually want.
