How Laura Rothkopf, LCSW, became media's go-to therapist

This story originally appeared in La Fronde’s Aug. 18 newsletter.

During my last months at Condé Nast, I was working no less than 15-hour days in an average week — not including the steady trickle of Slacks and emails that chimed throughout the night. The grind really stopped getting cute as I was inching further from the squirrelly energy of my early 30s, and it was pretty clear at that point: I had to reclaim my time.

The job I took after Condé was at a small magazine shop that gave me the space I sorely needed to figure out my shit. I was able to work from home and have some semblance of a social life again. If it wasn’t for that reclaimed time, I wouldn’t have had the mental space to realize that I could just do my own thing, write about things I actually care about, and have some real agency over my own career for once. And thankfully, I wasn’t delusional (that time, anyway) — I made it work and (I think?) I’m better off for it. 

Laura Rothkopf, LCSW, had a similar experience to mine. She spent nearly a decade at places like Vice and Warner Media before the grind just got too much. She ended up leaving her media life behind to become a therapist who now helps others in the industry navigate the same feelings she went through herself (and is taking new clients if anyone is looking for a new therapist!). I talked to her about how she made her career pivot and her sage mental health advice on dealing with the craziness that is media.

What led you to take the leap from a traditional nine-to-five in media to starting your own therapy practice?

What I loved most about working at Vice in particular, and also at Warner, was getting to work with creative folks, some genuinely visionary people, collaborating with them, hearing about their work and what was important to them and what they wanted [to communicate]. That was incredible and very energizing. It felt exciting to work in the middle of culture, and then there was a lot about it that was unsustainable over time.

My experience was very much: stay at the office until eight or nine, then go to drinks with coworkers, talk about work or something adjacent to work, go home and finish your work, go to bed, start doing it again. There were no boundaries, and a lot of that was by design — companies encouraging people to have every single one of their needs met by the office, by what they do.

That's the major throughline I see, especially with creative folks, because a lot of sense of self is fused with work output, with their creations. Any piece of feedback, or not getting credit for something, feels like a verdict on how well you're living up to being yourself. And when you're putting so much in and not receiving care, it's crushing, and over time it really eats away at your sense of self-worth.

It sounds like during that pivot you were managing two separate feelings — grieving the media career you were leaving behind, and having to reset your nervous system.

100%, absolutely. The shifts in my career — going to Warner and then to Amex, which seemed to a lot of people like a bizarre move — were about taking a step back and figuring out what I felt I really needed, and then finding jobs within that general landscape that met those needs at the time. At Amex, the work-life balance was incredible, and it opened up space for me to think about what I wanted, to separate the me that was always responding to pressure from who I really am and what feels meaningful to me. When I had that chance, it became clear that what would feel most meaningful would be to help other people feel like they were living lives that were theirs. That's when it clicked. I was going to do this — go back to school, spend years in training, do something completely different practically, though I found a way to connect the dots.

There were a lot of challenges. The practical ones — like leaving the career once I finally felt established — were real, but the bigger challenges for me were the identity challenges. There was a lot of being a beginner again, which is humbling. On top of that, I had to separate myself from values I'd taken ownership of that were, in reality, defenses that allowed me to survive in highly pressured environments — things like feeling competitive with other people, feeling like I had to fight to have my voice heard, feeling like doing more was always the best thing, and leaning on status as being an expert. To be an effective therapist, you're meant to do the exact opposite of all of that.

How did it look for you personally, untangling those feelings?

I think it began when I was at Vice, and continued through being at Warner Media and into Amex. It took a long time. I got to a point where, call it burnout, call it disillusionment, I felt I needed something else. So while still in the work, I stepped out. I tried something different, tried to reclaim some space for myself. That's tricky, especially when you've been doing one thing for so long that it's hard to even know what is yours and what you want to do, but I do think it's necessary, and even little things can help.

Reminding yourself that you have agency, that you have freedom, that you have your own wants and needs, and nurturing those even in small ways — that could look like looking for different work, or it could look like making very small shifts, like attempting to stop living so reactively. In high-pressure environments we're always reactive, because things are happening to us, demands are being imposed on us, change is happening, and we can feel so out of control, which can feel existentially threatening.

The control piece is big. Feeling out of control is frightening, and paradoxically, reminding ourselves that we are out of control is actually very empowering. There's this idea that while it feels soothing in a way to take on responsibility — to say this happened because I am X, Y, Z, or if only I had done more the outcome would have changed — a lot of the time that's actually dishonest. It's more comfortable, paradoxically, to feel responsible and even to take on blame than it is to feel powerless.

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What was the process like getting your license and setting up your own practice?

Licensing is a long road by design. It entailed graduate school for my MSW (I did mine at NYU), then a minimum of three years of supervised clinical work to accrue the hours required for independent licensure, plus two national exams. The formal licensing is just the baseline for practice — what most shaped how I work clinically (in addition to the fantastic supervision I received along the way) is the postgraduate training I pursued. I did a one-year postgraduate certificate in advanced clinical practice at NYU, then a two-year program in psychodynamic psychotherapy at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. On the couples side, I completed a few levels of training in Gottman Method Couples Therapy, and I'm about to begin a couples program at the William Alanson White Institute. It's a field in which the training never ends, and that's part of what drew me to it. It's also part of what makes it a long road!

Setting up my own practice involved a different kind of learning curve. After a handful of years of clinical work inside a group practice, going solo meant building the whole infrastructure of a small business myself: the legal and business setup, the clinical systems, the marketing, etc. Some of that work drew on my earlier career — building something from the ground up and thinking about who you're trying to connect with. It's been a serious adjustment, and one I've found to be quite meaningful.

When people who are in creative and media fields come to you, would you say identity crisis and nervous system dysregulation are the two main reasons they seek your help, or is there a wider range?

Definitely those two, and I'd say identity fusion is a real throughline, especially with creative folks. The nervous system piece is huge too, especially as the industry moves toward a lot more freelance work, folks taking ownership of their own stuff. With freelance work in entertainment, it's a feast-or-famine cycle — you have a job and then you don't, and when you don't you're clamoring for the next one, and when you do you're so fearful of it going away that you can't relax into it and enjoy the opportunity. A lot of people are thrown into a state of hypervigilance and live in it constantly, without necessarily noticing that's become their baseline until they slow down enough to see it. That bleeds into and permeates all aspects of life.

A lot of the time people show up saying they're having trouble sleeping, or they've experienced some disruption — they lose a job, or they've been relentlessly applying and not hearing back, and it's starting to take a toll. There's a lack of boundaries in the work, because these industries reward people who are always on, which eliminates any separation between your life and your work. 

What advice would you give to people who are thinking about making a similar pivot, but might not know yet what they want to do?

The most significant thing that comes to mind is to give themselves the space. I want to acknowledge that a lot of people make this choice based on something out of their control — maybe they lost a job, or they're having an impossible time finding another one, or there's just so much instability, or their function doesn't exist anymore. All of those are reasons to stop and reevaluate. Even if the choice is reactive, I'd encourage people not to make a reactive choice — to create enough space for themselves to really think about what matters to them, what will feel meaningful, to think about their creativity and themselves and what they want, and to be reminded of their choice and their agency, and that they can make it happen.

Especially in creative fields, my sense is that your creativity is portable. You can take something and make it your own — we don't have to be reliant on these big companies anymore. I'd encourage people to do something that's really reflective of their own wants and needs and desires and what feels meaningful to them, and to remember that they have a choice.