Paying Tax's on self employment.

Can anyone give me some honest advise and I mean honest.  Can we really and truly hand on heart and say we can make a good living off of hypnotherapy,  I mean run house pay mortgage buy food and run a car, and keep family? 

I have found that over the years most hypnotherapist that I know and I have asked "How's business" They say its great we are doing fine.  And it's not until you get to know them more meeting them in peer, supervision groups you eventually find out; well in fact they are not doing that well.  They have the odd client here and there, then work dries up and off we go again and this is how it basically goes. 

So do we really make a living ?

The reason I have brought this up, is because when I had a local accountant sort out my self assessment form for the end of the tax year.  He sort of went on and on at me and was having ago at me because he felt I was not seeing enough clients.  I did say to him "I cannot go out and press gang people in" I found his attitude really shitty with me. Or the other feeling I got do people actually declare that they are part time self employed or have small earnings?

Now I know nothing about Taxes and keeping legal I went to use the services of an accountant.  Has anyone else had this sort of problem?  Because being honest with you I think that a large majority of hypnotherapist would make losses every year. Especially with all these membership fees and continues professional development courses we are expected to keep going on. 

Interested to have some good honest feed back.

James