Who We Work With
Hurting Adolescents: A lot of change is happening in your brain as an adolescent as it is developing into a more integrated one. There is also a lot of change happening in your social world as you learn to navigate peer relationships, family relationships, and many other social experiences in preparation for adulthood. This can often cause pain for you, your parents, your family, or all of the above. Sometimes the only way you have found to handle this frustration is by cutting or engaging in other harmful behaviors? Maybe you have found the best way to let out the frustration is by yelling or fighting with your parents, or just disconnecting and sleeping a lot. We can help you find better ways to express your pain, and work with you and your family to get rid of the pain and frustration.
Overwhelmed Parents: Do you feel like you have tried everything to help your kid or adolescent live a healthy and fulfilled life, but there still seems to be turmoil in the family? Or maybe you see your child hurting, but cannot seem to figure out how to help them? Do you just need support in learning how to parent in a different way to meet the different needs of your children? We help parents identify what they are already doing well, and search for new approaches to help bring harmony to the family, and health to your hurting kids.
Playful Littles: We say playful because that is where we developmentally want our little humans to be during the younger years of their life. However, we know that sometimes our children can have big emotions and not know how to express themselves. We work with children of various ages, tailoring our work to developmentally meet them where they are at. We believe that play is often how children process and work through their emotions. When we work with kids, we are often looking for playful approaches to serious problems, and engage with kids in this way. We are often working with playful littles and overwhelmed parents during the course of therapy.
Disconnected Couples: Are you finding yourself in an argument with your partner that you have had thousands of times with resolution? Do feel stuck on how to work through a conflict? Or maybe the stress of work, family, money, or parenting can has caused a rift between you and your partner, making it hard for you to heard and understood. We help couples reconnect so they can stand together against stress, get unstuck in a continuous cycle, and find enjoyment with one another. We also provide premarital counseling for those who are wanting to enter into marriage as a united couple against life.
Everyone in-between: Did you not see yourself or the problem you are dealing with fitting into any of the above descriptions? We also help individuals, couples, and families who are dealing with many other problems, and work with people from the whole spectrum of the lifespan.
Trauma Work: Research has shown that Trauma changes the way our body and mind interact with each other, which often causes us to interact with ourselves, other people, and the world in painful ways. We have specialized training in Trauma work using a method called Lifespan Integration, Parts Work, and EMDR.
What to Expect
Not knowing what the therapy experience is like can add stress to an already stressful situation. We do not want this not-knowing to interfere with your decision in seeking counseling, so we have developed an outline of what to expect:
Initial Intake Session: In this first session, we will go over the paperwork, discuss the therapy process more, and begin to hear your story. Don’t worry about feeling like you may have nothing to say; we will lead our time together and try to make your experience as comfortable as possible as we become acquainted.
Session 2-3: During the second and third sessions, we will focus on continuing to hear your problem story, and look for potential preferred stories, or ways you would like to live instead of the way it is now. From this, we will begin to create a “treatment plan”, or the focus and goals for counseling. The focus and goals for each individual’s counseling experience will be unique and created together to best meet your needs.
Sessions 4-Completion*: The following sessions will be spent working together on meeting the goals we set. We often revisit the goals, changing them or adding new ones as needed. *Completion of therapy is decided by you, when you have met your goals or you feel you are at a place to continue the work on your own. The amount of session ranges from family to family. We hope to be a resource in your life, with the ultimate goal of providing you with the skills you need to continue on your own, supported by yourself and those around you.
This is just an outline, sometimes we will move faster, and other times we will want to allow more time to hear your story.
In-Person vs Telehealth
At Larch, we believe there are times for both in-person and telehealth appointments and because of that, all of our therapist offer therapy in both modalities. We do believe that there are times that one modality is more appropriate than the other.
In-person: In general, we believe meeting in person in our curated office space allows you to enter into the healing space in a unique way. Some of the reasons we believe this are the following:
- Research shows that the effectiveness of the therapeutic process is greatly impacted by the therapeutic relationship, and we believe that being in person allows for the relationship to be built in a more natural way, allowing our mirror neurons to fire from having the whole spectrum of body language.
- We believe that being in a therapeutic office allows for more privacy and a stronger ability to be vulnerable, with less distractions from the world around us.
- The office space allows for a container to enter into the therapeutic space. Therapy can be hard, and by shifting into a specific space where we engage in the process can help our body and mind shift into an intention mode. It also allows us to shift back into our lives by moving out of the space, allowing it to be a container until we return for out next appointment.
- Working with the younger population, play is more natural in the physical space.
Telehealth: Telehealth has a few benefits over in person appointments, mainly opening up the opportunity for therapy even when the burden of getting to the office because of location or schedule limits in -person appointments. It also adds congruency of care when minor illnesses or local travel would normally be prohibitory to attending your regularly scheduled appointment.
When engaging in telehealth, our therapist use a HIPPA compliant Zoom platform, offering a seamless transition into therapy without requiring a Zoom account or special telehealth portal. Per WA law, our clinicians are trained in ethical use of telehealth.
Whichever modality you choose, we believe the biggest step and most important steps is scheduling an appointment.
Fees
Licensed and Associate Counselors: $175 (53 minutes)
Clinical Interns: $80 (53 minutes)
To read more about our internship program to get a better idea of what it would mean to work with an intern, please click here.
We accept cash, check, and most major credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover). Payment is to be made at each session (we can save credit cards on your file to avoid dealing with payment each session).
Insurance
We are private pay providers, and do not bill insurance directly. Although we understand that for some billing insurance is necessary, we believe there are many benefits to not billing insurance. For example, most insurance companies want to dictate how counseling is to be conducted, and what types of counseling will be covered, often denying certain types of couple and family work, and requiring a diagnosis for reimbursement. We believe that counseling is more effective if it is controlled by the counselor and client, rather than being dictated by a third party. Another benefit to not taking insurance is we can spend more time providing care to the people we work with, instead of spending hours completing all the paperwork and figure out the requirements of each insurance company.
**Out of Network Reimbursement
Sometimes insurance companies reimburse for Out of Network Providers for some types of services. We are happy to submit these claims for you, but do not tailor our work towards insurance companies and reimbursement for the cost of counseling. We often recommend people seek treatment with us if reimbursement is not necessary for the cost of treatment. If it is not necessary, but you would like to plan ahead for the cost of treatment, you can read our insurance policy here.
**Please note, we do not submit Out of Network Claims for counseling with an Intern