The Traveling Therapist Podcast · Kym Tolson

201. Life as a Traveling Therapist with Chronic Illness with Dr. Sally Riggs

·45 min·5 clips

The speaker starts with a familiar pattern in therapist business building. Solo practice becomes group practice. Then comes office subletting. She says those steps are common, but common does not always mean right. Being sick changed how she saw every default option. It was horrendous to be sick, and it forced her to find ways out financially and medically. That pressure helped her let go of work choices that were serving the business but not her body. She wanted her practice to help her instead of getting in the way. As she began to recover, travel slowly came back into view. Family in the UK kept that pull strong, and she still found ways to cross the Atlantic during lockdown. Her British passport let her get in, and her American passport let her get out. Travel made her feel worse at first. She still had to cancel a couple of trips at her lowest point. When her health improved enough, she started looking for a safer, smaller way to build momentum. A three-day weekend in Chicago became that test run. A photographer friend offered a win-win setup with professional photos and a place to practice traveling again. She had to manage masking, risk, and the realities of being high risk even for something as ordinary as a shoot. Each trip taught her something, even when parts of it went wrong. The conversation keeps coming back to the same core idea: flexibility only matters if the business actually supports the life inside it. Her story is less about chasing a travel aesthetic and more about building work around what a human body can sustain.

As heard by us

A business story about building work around the body, not against it.

The episode is at its best when it treats flexibility as a business decision, not a lifestyle perk. It moves through solo practice, group practice, and office subletting, then lands on a simple point: a common path can still be the wrong one when health, money, and travel all…

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Why you'd press play

A candid look at rebuilding a therapy practice when illness and travel keep forcing new rules on the job.

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