Most appointments are 45 or 60 minutes, but we also offer 90-minute sessions. Longer appointments are sometimes recommended for couple or family therapy sessions or for individual appointments that don’t occur weekly. Your therapist will make a recommendation on length of session after the first appointment and will take into consideration your own availability and needs.

For the first session, we offer an optional 90-minute extended appointment at a discounted rate. This longer intake appointment can be helpful to get to know your therapist and for your therapist to gather your comprehensive background information.

In the first session, we’ll review the intake paperwork you completed, discuss The Mindful Heart’s policies, and address any questions you have. Then we’ll get to know one another and talk about your goals for our time together.

Most sessions are held on a weekly basis. Meeting weekly is the quickest way to build a relationship with your therapist and make progress towards your goals. We recognize that sessions are a financial and time commitment and therefore are committed to working with clients where they are at. If weekly sessions aren’t feasible for you, we will make a schedule to accommodate biweekly sessions or an alterative that is agreeable between you and your therapist.

Part of what makes the client-therapist relationship unique is the mandate of confidentiality. This means that everything you share in session is not shared with anyone else. The mandate of confidentiality hopefully enables you to feel safe sharing what’s on your mind in session. Along these lines, if your therapist were to see you out in public, they would maintain your confidentiality by not initiating a conversation. If you chose to approach your therapist to say hello, they would of course respond.

There are limitations to confidentiality that are outlined in our Informed Consent. If a client shares information about being the victim of abuse, abusing others, or potentially harming one’s self or others, we are required to take necessary steps to keep our clients and the public safe from harm and thus will break confidentiality as needed.

This right to confidentiality extends to children and teens as well.  Our therapists will keep confidential what our teenage and child-age clients share with us unless what is shared falls into the criteria outlined above, the child says it’s okay to share, or the therapist uses their discretion to decide an issue is critical enough to warrant involvement from parents/caregivers.

For parents/caregivers of children 11 years old and younger, we request to meet with the parents alone for the first session. We’ll use this time to get to know you as a parent and to obtain full background information on your child. We will thoroughly discuss your concerns and outline goals for our time together. We will assess your child’s willingness to participate in sessions and discuss the possible structures of sessions moving forward. For the second session, we ask that you bring your child. Typically we’d meet all together – you, your child, and your therapist at the beginning of this session. Then, with your child’s permission, we would meet 1:1 with your child.

For parents/caregivers of children 12 years old and older, we request that you bring your child with you to the first session. Typically we meet with the parents and children in this age range together for the first part of the initial session. Then, with the child’s permission, we would meet 1:1 with your child for the bulk of the session and invite you, the parent, back in at the end.