Your donation to WILA does so much more than help us provide high-quality, affordable therapy. It also provides emerging therapists with a theoretical home and community—changing their lives as they work to help patients make meaningful change.
Support WILA’s Mission
Many of us come to WILA in or straight out of graduate school, with varying degrees of theoretical knowledge, clinical practice, and lived experience. What we share is a curiosity about psychoanalytic psychotherapy and a desire to support WILA’s mission of providing affordable therapy to everyday people. We arrive seeking training—hours to log, direct practice with diverse patients, exceptional supervision, and thought-provoking courses—but what we find here is something much deeper.
WILA becomes a home—one that shapes how we listen, how we think, how we relate, and ultimately, who we become as clinicians and humans.
What WILA Means to Us
WILA leaves a distinct imprint on every trainee who walks through its doors. Below, you will find a collection of reflections from current trainees and alumni regarding their experience at WILA:
WILA has met me in the tender places of my becoming and taught me how to stay with what is still forming. The love here has shaped both my hands as a clinician and my heart as a person.
— 1st Year Trainee
Taking part in WILA’s mission, providing low-cost, long-term mental health treatment, while being supported in my development by a community of peers, educators, and mentors, many of whom know the experience personally, has created a meaningful source of fulfillment and community at this early stage of my professional growth.
— 1st Year Trainee
There is a clear demarcation in both my professional and personal life – before WILA, and after WILA. The training here has not only surfaced parts of myself previously unseen, but emboldened me to turn and face them due to the holding environment it provides that is required for a burgeoning psychotherapist.
— 2nd Year Trainee
My training so far has been profoundly heart and mind-opening. I came to WILA seeking solid professional mentorship and supervision, and what I’ve found here is a community of elders and peers—a theoretical family to learn from and lean on. I truly cannot imagine learning how to do this work without the foundation I am getting at WILA.
— 2nd Year Trainee
WILA gave me an intellectual and social “home” at a time in which I struggled to know where I belonged in the field. It changed my life and my mind – I couldn’t be more grateful for the relationships and lessons I received from this organization.
— Recent WILA graduate
WILA was more than a training site for me, it felt like a psychoanalytic home where I could both grow and do the kind of work with patients that called to my heart and helped them the most. WILA isn’t just about learning depth-orienting therapy, it’s about practicing this learning in our lives in an in-depth way. To be at WILA is to live psychoanalysis, to internalize psychoanalysis, until you can’t imagine seeing or being any other way.
— WILA alum, 10+ years out
It’s clear that WILA is so much more than a training site. WILA is a home, a holding space, a place for transformation—professional and personal—that directly shapes how we trainees show up for the people that we serve and those in our lives.
Support That Ripples Outward
At the heart of WILA’s model is a shared exchange: trainees provide affordable, long-term psychotherapy to the community, and WILA provides trainees with rigorous supervision, education, and a foundational framework that we apply not only to our clinical practice, but also to the way we see and interact with the world. Patients are helped, trainees are shaped, and in turn, WILA’s legacy is carried forward.
Your support sustains this mutual transformation—allowing both patients and therapists to experience meaningful, enduring change. This change, then, ripples outward to impact the relationships, families, and communities that WILA patients and trainees are a part of.
Why Your Donation Matters
WILA does not receive any government funding, which means we rely on the donations from people like you to keep our doors open. Every dollar raised goes directly toward:
- Providing affordable, high-quality, long-term therapy
- Cultivating and facilitating safe spaces to process in community
- Training socially conscious therapists in depth-oriented, psychoanalytic care
- Sustaining a community where learning, growth, and connection unfold over time
Your donation is more than financial support. Your gift is a ripple—a widening circle of impact that touches patients, trainees, and the communities we serve and are a part of.
Please use the following link to contribute to WILA’s work
To learn more about WILA’s services and training programs, use the following links:
https://wila.org/affordable-psychotherapy/
https://wila.org/affordable-psychotherapy/group-therapy/traumagroup/
https://wila.org/affordable-psychotherapy/group-therapy/mensgroup/