Founder Therapy: How Entrepreneurial Mental Health Needs a Different Approach

May 1

Let’s be honest: Founding a company isn’t just a career move. It’s an emotional expedition. One that can feel exhilarating, isolating, gut-wrenching, and awe-inspiring. Yep, it’s called the emotional rollercoaster, and being a founder means that you experience all of these deep emotions, often times, in the same day, woof.

Post-COVID, entrepreneurship is booming. Small businesses have created over 70% of new jobs in the United States since 2020 (U.S. Treasury). As a cultural wave of specialized therapy clinics rises, targeting everything from tech employees to south asians to new moms, one group remains deeply underserved: entrepreneurs.

Searching "New York therapist near me" may pull up hundreds of results. But if you’re a founder, you quickly learn that not all therapy is created equal.

At Our Kind, we believe therapy for founders must be different because the founder experience is different, and their collective trauma and emotions, and struggles are different.

Here’s why.

1. The Business Is Personal

For most founders, their startup is not just a job, it’s their identity, their purpose, and their dream woven into a business plan. In traditional therapy, "work" and "self" are often compartmentalized. But for entrepreneurs, that separation simply doesn't exist. At Our Kind Therapy, we weave these in together.

Founder therapy needs to address the messy, tangled web between self-worth, company success, and emotional survival. We help founders disentangle their identity from their output so that they can build sustainable businesses without sacrificing their emotional health.

2. High Performance, Low Support

Startup founders are expected to make high-stakes decisions, weather massive uncertainty, and perform under relentless pressure. Investors expect returns. Teams expect leadership. Partners expect certainty.

But who supports the supporter?

Traditional therapy may not recognize the unique "always-on" intensity founders live under. Therapy for founders must create a confidential, judgment-free zone where leaders can collapse for a moment, be held, process stress, and rebuild emotional resilience, without risking credibility or reputation.

3. Founder Loneliness Is Real (and Dangerous)

Building a company can be profoundly isolating. Even in crowded coworking spaces or Zoom calls, founders often carry emotional burdens alone. Friends and family may try to empathize, but unless they've had to fire employees to make payroll or shut down a company they loved, they simply can't fully understand, but we get it.

Founder-focused therapy is different. It's a space where loneliness isn't just acknowledged, it's treated. It's a space where a founder's fear, guilt, ambition, and vision can be heard, seen, and worked with strategically.

4. Burnout Wears a Mask

Founders are masters of endurance. They’re used to pushing through 80-hour weeks, delayed paychecks, and existential risks.

But here’s the dark truth: high tolerance for stress can be a trap. Burnout often disguises itself as "just another hard week." Over time, it leads to emotional numbness, poor decision-making, health issues, and disconnection from the very passion that started it all.

Working with a therapist who "gets it" can help founders recognize the early warning signs of burnout before it becomes a cliff.

5. Therapy vs Executive Coaching: Not the Same Thing

Executive coaching is powerful, but it's not therapy.

Coaching typically focuses on forward-looking goals and building movement through the conversation: building skills, managing teams, raising funds, and scaling operations. It's strategic, action-driven, and tactical.

However, at Our Kind Therapy, our coaches embody an emotion-focused approach to coaching, and having sat on all sides of the table from being Techstars mentors, VC fund employees, and angel investors, they have lived through the experience themselves.

Therapy, especially therapy designed for founders, CEOs and entrepreneurs, goes deeper.

Therapy helps founders:

Heal emotional wounds from leadership trauma
Navigate existential fear around success and failure
Process grief from startup losses
Repair nervous system dysregulation

At Our Kind, we integrate the strategic with the emotional. We believe true leadership strength comes from emotional integration, not just skill mastery.

6. Not All Therapy Is Created Equal

When it comes to therapy styles, founders deserve more than a "one-size-fits-all" approach. Some common modalities include:

CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy): Focuses on challenging and reframing negative thoughts.
IFS (Internal Family Systems Therapy): Helps you explore and heal the different “parts” of yourself through inner voices personification and emotional roles.
EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy): Helps strengthen emotional bonds and attachment patterns.
DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy): Teaches emotional regulation and distress tolerance.
ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy): Focuses on acceptance strategies and behavioral change.

Each modality offers something valuable.

But at Our Kind, we use AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) and here's why.

7. Why AEDP Is Different (and Better for Founders)

AEDP is a cutting-edge therapeutic approach designed to heal trauma, unlock resilience, and accelerate growth.

It’s experiential and emotion-focused, meaning it doesn’t just analyze your thoughts. It helps you feel your way into new patterns of safety, strength, and self-trust. And we all know that the best way to heal is through feeling your emotions, not by thinking through them. It is heart-led versus head-led.

AEDP believes that emotional suffering isn't a pathology to "manage" but a wound that can be healed through secure, attuned relationships. In the hands of an AEDP-trained therapist, founders can:

Process deep emotional bottlenecks blocking leadership potential
Rewire self-worth from external validation (funding, press, accolades) to internal resilience
Restore vitality so passion, creativity, and connection come back online

In a world obsessed with hustle, AEDP permits founders to feel, and in doing so, enables them to become even more powerful.

Why We Built Our Kind

We saw a gap. We saw an ecosystem where founders were celebrated for their Series A but left to suffer in silence through the sleepless nights, existential dread, and burnout.

We built Our Kind to change that.

Therapy for founders isn't a luxury. It's survival. It'sa strategy. It's leadership work at the deepest level.

If you’ve been typing "therapist near me who works with founders" into your search bar, you’re already doing one of the bravest things a founder can do: choosing to lead yourself first.

And trust us, the business (and the life) you're building will be better for it.

Looking for a New York therapist for entrepreneurs?

Our Kind specializes in founder therapy, emotional leadership coaching, and nervous system resilience. We’re here to help you lead with your whole heart and become a brave heart.

Written by Alysha Malik.

Alysh Malik