It’s not that I didn’t understand the value of a sales pitch. In all my years as a writer, I was constantly having to package myself to sell books. But I was attracted to my new field because psychotherapy was about as far away from marketing as you could get. It was intense, personal work; it was as simultaneously simple and profound as sitting in a quiet room with another human being, technology turned off, helping them transform their lives in meaningful ways. Hocking my clinical wares like a Toyota dealer felt bizarre, so bizarre that while I resolved to start hustling and getting my name out there at networking events with other therapists, I certainly wasn’t going to create a so-called brand.

Three months into private practice, I had exactly four regular weekly clients. If I were a Toyota dealer, I’d be out of business. To make things seem less grim, I booked my clients back to back, so when the green light indicating that my next session had arrived went on, I felt as if I’d reached the place I labored so hard for. The work was immensely gratifying. My clients delved into their sessions. Couples found ways to connect. Others began to see how they were holding themselves back. But when the light stayed dim at the end of that last hour, I was faced with the gap between my notions of what I assumed for so long would be a thriving practice and the reality of a near-empty one.

One evening at a networking event (most were attended by equally underemployed clinicians), I was invited to a group in which therapists could talk about their struggles. A support group for failed therapists? I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, but I took this as a sign that my ideals weren’t going to be enough to make this work. A colleague who told me she had some success turning around her practice by marketing herself with YouTube videos persuaded me to create a Web page so at least I’d be searchable to potential clients. She suggested that I call Alison Roth, who started the firm ShrinkWr@p (tag line: “Web sites even Freud would envy”). During my free consultation, I told Roth that I wanted a simple, professional-looking Web site, but she told me that wouldn’t be enough. She said the same thing as Truffo: If I wanted clients, then I needed a brand.

Picking a therapist is “not the same as choosing a good cardiologist, who you might see twice a year and will never know about your massive insecurity,” she explained. “Therapy is a very intimate experience. People need to like you when they Google you. They want to feel an immediate personal connection.”

I knew she was right. Many people admit that a sense of connection is more important in choosing a therapist than the clinician’s reputation or training. One woman told me that she chose her therapist because “she looked relaxed” in the photos on her Web site, “and I didn’t want anybody too intense, because I’m really high-strung.” A man explained that he found his therapist via referral, but “the Web site sealed the deal, because I discovered that her father was a Holocaust survivor, and I knew that was territory I needed to visit.” Another woman chose her therapist because her blog revealed that she had successfully overcome “food issues” in college, something this client was struggling with.

But disclosing this sort of personal information has always been tricky for therapists — in graduate school, psychology students are instructed not to display family photos in their offices and even to choose carefully the types of magazines they place in their waiting rooms — yet savvy branding specialists encourage just those kinds of subtle revelations. If you’re a parent, if you’re gay, if you’ve suffered from chronic illness, if you’re a child of divorce, if you’ve lost a loved one: sharing this, they say, makes clients with a similar history feel that you “get it.”

I mentioned this to my colleague Dina Zeckhausen, who has been practicing in Atlanta for more than 20 years, and she said she had seen this change, too. “It used to be that if somebody asked about your personal life, you’d reflect that back and interpret why they’re asking and what it means,” she said. “People don’t put up with that anymore. If you’re that way, they’ll say: ‘That therapist was so aloof. I felt so uncomfortable. It was such a weird interaction.’ But as therapists, we lose useful material we used to get in the transference.”