Meet Betsy Chung, Psy.d

We had the good fortune of connecting with Betsy Chung, Psy.d and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Betsy, what do you attribute your success to?
I’m a firm believer in paying your dues and being realistic about expectations. I would consider myself fully self-made, and along the journey of getting here, I needed to do a lot of “free work” to get noticed and overcome many personal challenges to grow as a mental health professional. What I often encounter are people who earn a degree, become licensed, and expect to have a thriving business. I recall having those same expectations because I felt that I “earned” success by completing so many years of schooling, but later learned that that’s just entitlement.

When I first decided to pursue my own practice, I was struggling to fill my caseload and hesitatingly decided to work with insurance companies to get clients. In my field, many people see working with insurance companies as some sort of a private practice “failure” because it means you weren’t able to grow your own clientele. But over time, I realized that working with insurance companies allowed me to show clients what I was capable of as a therapist, which helped me develop a loyal client base over the years. In another attempt to grow my own clientele, I also started an Instagram page and poured many hours of my free time writing posts that might get me 20 *likes* from friends and family. As discouraging and as time consuming as it was to write posts only to get so little traction, I kept going because I also found a lot of personal value in it. Each post that I wrote allowed me to organize my philosophies and improve how I talked about psychological concepts.

As my followers slowly grew, I began to get more positive feedback from friends and family about how much they were learning from my posts, and would eventually get journalists reaching out to contribute to their relationship articles, and podcast hosts asking to interview me about relationships and childhood upbringing. Finally, all of the extra work I was putting in to become a better therapist was getting noticed by the media, and slowly, my own client following grew to a point where I no longer needed to rely on insurance companies to send me clients anymore.

Though I’m nowhere near a “viral” expert on Instagram, nor am I a millionaire from what I do, I consider myself a success because I’m able to comfortably support myself doing what I absolutely love. I truly believe that a huge part of my success comes from loving what I do so much that I don’t mind doing it for free. Rather than focusing on how much money I was making, I cared more about how good of a psychologist I was becoming, and eventually, those efforts will be recognized and appreciated.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
What sets me apart from others is that I’m not afraid to be my full authentic self in sessions with clients. Clients that choose to work with me tend to comment on my compassionate, yet direct style of therapy, which required me to have to break a lot of rules I learned in school about how a therapist is supposed to behave.

What I’m most proud of is the fact that I have developed my own faithful client following who trust me to help them navigate difficulties. Most of my clients stay in therapy with me for at least 2 years, and after termination, would occasionally return for “maintenance” sessions, which tells me that they’ve successfully worked through major past traumas and can independently function well, but also feel comfortable to seek my support when things get too overwhelming again. To me, that should be the outcome of every successful therapeutic treatment where clients generally feel capable of handling life, but able to seek out support when it’s needed.

I got to where I am today by continuing to educate myself to become a better psychologist. I see myself as a lifelong student and not afraid for clients to see me improve.

Looking back, getting to where I am at today in my career required a lot of persistence. For example, there was a time when I really wanted to change my style of therapy. I was learning so much about being more of a trauma-informed therapist, but incorporating that knowledge in treatment with clients meant that I was going to need to tolerate many, many sessions with clients where I felt like I wasn’t doing a good job. I needed to trust that through practice, I would eventually get better at what I was doing.

The greatest lesson that I learned is that as long as I don’t give up, eventually I’ll land somewhere good.

I’d like people to know that success truly does come from finding your own passion. When you love what you do, you will just naturally do more of it, and get better and better at it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I would probably want to show my best friend around my own city — Long Beach. I always grew up in Southern California, but didn’t move to Long Beach until 2017 and have never appreciated a place more. Long Beach is such a diverse yet inviting community, and I would love for my friend to be able to experience how you can so easily move through the different sub-communities and feel welcome no matter where you go.

We would probably do a lot of walking and try a lot of the local restaurants and cafes in the area. We’ll definitely drive around town to do some vintage shopping, and drive over the bridge to San Pedro to experience the unique atmosphere there as well.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Though I consider myself self-made in terms of where I am in my career, there’s no way I could have gotten here without the love and support of my wonderful husband, loving family, and loyal friends.

Website: www.drbetsychung.com

Instagram: love always.drbetsy