Both as a client and a therapist I have directly witnessed the invaluable benefits of the therapeutic process. However valuable the service, it’s expensive and many people simply cannot afford to access therapy.

With a little knowledge about your benefits therapy can become more accessible. Here are the ways I have helped make therapy services affordable for my clients.

1.       Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs). Many employers now offer EAP benefits for their employees and their dependents. These benefits are pre-paid by an employer and are offered to employees independent of healthcare insurance. EAPs typically allow anywhere from 1 to 6 counseling sessions free of cost to the employee. When requesting these services employees give a brief overview of their difficulties, e.g. “relationship problem” and can request a specific therapist or will be referred to a therapist near their home or work. The EAP is a third party entity and your personal information, including your counseling sessions, are kept confidential from your employer.  
Couples can especially benefit from EAP services. Since these services are provided to both employee and their dependents, EAP sessions may be doubled. Example: Employee uses 6 sessions for couples counseling. Then employee’s spouse requests 6 sessions for couples counseling. Equaling 12 sessions, which may be all the therapy a couple needs.

Often employees are unaware of these services. Just because you haven’t heard of an EAP before doesn’t mean you don’t have one. When clients contact me for services this is one of the first things I ask, “Find out if you have an EAP.” I direct a client to contact their HR department and request they see me through their EAP. Employees are given a number to contact the EAP. The EAP then contacts me and provides me with the needed paperwork. The initial phone call is typically all the contact you will have with the EAP.   

In many cases folks need to continue their therapy sessions past their EAP sessions. Clients can continue by using their healthcare coverage, paying full fee or sliding scale fee.

2.       Using healthcare insurance.  Coverage for mental health counseling has drastically improved since the passage of the parity laws. While we used to see insurance covering a mere 8 to 10 sessions, it is now not uncommon for insurance to cover 30, 40, or unlimited session amounts.  Co-pays range from $0 to $30 per session. Often plans have deductibles which need to be met before coverage kicks in. In these instances, I work with clients to make meeting these deductibles affordable.

3.       Sliding Fee Scales. I offer a sliding fee scale for those clients paying cash, without EAP or Healthcare Insurance benefits.

I work with clients to find affordable solutions for therapy, including contacting their insurance plan. If you have wanted to engage in therapy, yet felt it was out of reach, send me an email, maybe we can find a way to make it more accessible.   

Every once and awhile I peruse my local thrift stores in search of literary gems. Recently, I took a little romp down the musty smelling aisles to see what I could find. Prompted by the search for a 5^th book to complete my buy 4 get one free coupon, I found my newest treasure: "Appetites: Why Women Want" by Caroline Knapp.

At the onset, this book is about eating disorders. Upon further inspection the reader begins to understand this book encompasses much more than the topic of a “disorder”. Part sociological and cultural critique, part memoire, with brave honesty and a remarkable depth of insight, author Caroline Knapp unravels the complexity of women’s desires. It’s not so much that women’s desires are complex, it is more the realizing, the exercising of desires which confounds and escapes us. What do you really want? What do you really need? What in fact do you desire? Simple questions, yet for most of the women I sit with these are the questions which are toughest to answer. “Appetite” gives us an image of how women have answered these questions; an image of an eating disorder – the ultimate way to deny ‘need’ by denying the most basic of needs – sustenance. To hold desire and to be denied; to hold desire and to be ridiculed, chastised, or ignored leads us toward denial that we even hold a concept of desire at all. In the most severe denial of desire is to answer “I have none.” Eating disorders are one way to attempt to reconcile desires gone unrealized. Alcohol and drugs numb us out to the pangs of desire. Shopping beyond our means gives a false sense of realizing desire. Assuming the role of ‘superwoman’ produces a fatigue in which there is no room left to even consider desire. These are other ways women attempt to reconcile unmet desire. Stamp it out, numb it out, deny it out. Now I ask: How would things be different if we proudly announced our desires…and then demanded they be met? Met not by transient disguised desire in moments of consumer bliss or a good hair day, but real authentic actualization of desire; how would this change our personal lives, the lives of our family, of our community?