About Jeanene Wolfe, LCSW: Founder of CollabOasis

I’ve been a social worker for over 30 years, an LCSW since 2009, and a solo online private practice owner since 2016.

And I’ll tell you something I didn’t expect when I opened that practice: I loved being my own boss, and I was lonelier than I had ever been in my career.

I had the freedom I wanted. I also had imposter syndrome that showed up uninvited, hard cases I carried home in my head, and no colleague down the hall to catch me between sessions and ask how I was really doing. I’m a person who helps people connect for a living, and I was professionally alone.

Here’s what changed things: as I met other solo therapists, I realized it wasn’t just me. It was almost everyone. We’d all built practices we were proud of, and we were all quietly missing the same thing.

So I went looking for good peer consultation. What I found instead were Facebook groups too big and too public for real vulnerability, and free peer groups where nobody facilitated, the discussion devolved into venting, and the faces changed every month. I also heard story after story of clinicians who had been genuinely hurt by poorly run groups, and who wrote off peer consultation entirely because of it.

That’s why I built CollabOasis, and why I built it the way I did. Small, closed, curated groups. A facilitator (me) in every single session. A culture built deliberately on benevolence, trust, and honest feedback. Not because those are nice words for a website, but because I’d seen exactly what happens without them.

A few things about me, professionally:

I’ve facilitated hundreds of consultation group sessions since founding CollabOasis in 2020. I host the podcast Colleague Down the Hall. I’ve written for the SimplePractice blog on the importance of therapist consultation groups, been a guest on Abundance Practice Building, All Things Private Practice, and A Simple Therapy Podcast, and spoken at the NASW Virginia/DC Metro convention. I still see clients in my own practice, because staying in the work keeps me on top of what the work asks of us.

And a few things about me, humanly:

I believe you can validate someone deeply and still tell them the truth. I believe most of what therapists call “not being good enough” is actually “not having anyone to talk to.” I believe our field trained us to give endlessly and taught us almost nothing about receiving. And I believe, with my whole heart, that the work we do is hard but it doesn’t have to be lonely.

If any of that sounds like the kind of colleague you’ve been missing, I’d love to meet you.