If you and your therapist decide to work together, you will be asked to complete paperwork prior to your first appointment, which you can access at the link below. This helps us get to know you and your current challenges, so we can make the best use of our time during your first appointment.

From there, we will schedule our first official appointment, called an “intake” appointment. During the intake appointment, we will identify your specific issues of concerns and goals for therapy. We will get started immediately on working toward your identified goals.

As much as possible, we try to create a routine schedule that usually starts off once a week, but the frequency can be adjusted to meet your needs. Sometimes, a person or a couple is in crisis and may need more than one session per week, and, at other times, schedules or finances limit sessions to every other week or once a month. We will discuss what frequency works best for you and try to set a specific day and time for each appointment as we follow up. 

It is always very difficult to determine exactly how many sessions we will have. For relationship counseling, we like to plan for at least 12 sessions and not more than 20. At that point, we will then evaluate where we are to see if we need to continue or finish services. A client or couple can stop therapy at any time for any reason. We just ask that you communicate your desire to stop therapy and if there is any way for us to improve our services.

Therapy sessions will begin with setting an agenda for this session and will end with setting a tentative agenda for the next session. The “agenda” helps us plan for the topics we plan to discuss and what we hope to accomplish in this session. At the end of each session, the therapist will help you summarize the information discussed and will often ask you what your “takeaway” was from this session or what was most helpful, as well as what do you plan to do with this information between now and our next session. 

Sometimes the therapist will send you additional information to support a discussion we have had and help you remember a certain new skill you might be practicing. Homework can be difficult to remember and people often forget to follow through on this. Your therapist will be patient with you and work at your pace. We don’t load you up with a bunch of things to do in between sessions, but the idea is for you to practice and implement new skills as we go.

Clients can communicate with the therapist in between sessions with the use of a client portal for secure messaging. The therapist may not be able to reply immediately but will review any communications prior to your next session and will try to schedule an emergency appointment if needed. Due to limited time between sessions, it is preferred that communications in between sessions are limited and brief, such as “I really need to talk to you about (XXXX) next time we meet.”