People who enter therapy have varying experiences based on their life histories and expectations of therapy. Going to your first session may feel slightly anxiety provoking as you meet a stranger who will ask you many personal questions. This anxiety is likely to subside very quickly as you form trust and a sense of connection with your clinician. Other people report immediate relief as they feel they are on the road to improving their lives. Therapy helps you to gain tools for short term relief while you do the more drawn-out work of better understanding yourself and relationship to your problems.

At The Therapy Practice, we support depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, ADHD, substance use disorders and complex and traditional post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). (We also work with couples). While these diagnoses and more are in our professional wheelhouse, diagnosis is just at the surface related to the process therapy. The real meat of therapy is working with your therapist towards truly comprehending how your life’s circumstances and mind works and creates the symptoms you experience. With this understanding, it is possible to create meaningful change across all aspects of your life, no matter your diagnosis.

There are two options when paying for therapy – using one’s insurance and private pay. At The Therapy Practice, we are a fee-for-service practice, which means we do not accept insurance. This allows for greater flexibility, choice and confidentiality within the therapy process. Many clients have out-of-network benefits as a part of their insurance plan. On a monthly basis, we will send you a superbill to submit to your insurance company which may entitle to you a percentage of the session as reimbursement.

This is a question we encounter often at our practice, and it is a difficult one to answer. Sometimes people encounter situations in their lives that cause distress for a discrete period of time, and they are on their way within a few months. Others find that issues with which they struggle are much more longstanding and require more effort to change patterns and ways of relating. For example, recovering from traumatic experiences during childhood and rewriting your internal dialogue and sense of self can take significantly longer. The best way to estimate the length of therapy is to give therapy a try and have a conversation with your therapist about treatment length which will be guided by their professional experience.

It may seem all too easy to look at others and think, gee, that person should talk to someone. But when do we know if it’s time for us to get some help? Quite simply, therapy is warranted when life doesn’t feel as good as you had hoped. This could look like feelings of anxiety all day, difficulty sleeping due to racing thoughts, intense emotions that seem challenging to control, constant conflict in relationships, burnout at work, envy towards others, or just a quiet sense that something is not right inside of you. One of the many benefits of living in a society that is more understanding of mental well-being is that you do not have to have a diagnosis to need therapy. Therapy is a place to work on both serious mental disorders or sort out why you feel unfulfilled.

It may be difficult to imagine a stranger whose life history you do not know is able to understand you with your own unique story. Clients come to therapy from varying racial identities, sexual and gender orientations, economic backgrounds, medical disabilities, etc. Those from stigmatized backgrounds may worry about another experience of not being understood. At The Therapy Practice, we have experience working with people from diverse backgrounds and acknowledge there may be gaps in understanding. This is why we approach our work from a person-centered lens, meaning we see each person as an individual yet someone who also belongs to various larger groups (eg. man, queer woman).