THERAPY PROCESS

Our work will unfold through genuine connection, attuned intention, deepening complexity, transformative accountability — and, always, radical care. The emergent specificity of this process is potently unpredictable, but knowing the high-level path we’ll weave may help to ease apprehension and (re)plant the seeds of stability, curiosity, and hope.

CONSULTATION SESSION – FREE, 60 MINUTES

I offer a free, 60-minute consultation session (usually in person, but currently virtual due to COVID). Of course, if you find that we don’t need the full hour, we can end our consultation earlier — it’s completely up to you. After we’ve discussed your right to confidentiality — including specific limitations and exceptions set out within the scope of my designation as a Registered Social Worker — the process will be flexible and conversational.

This time together, while not therapy, is an opportunity for you to:

  • Experience being with me, beginning to feel how everything I’ve shared on this site comes uniquely into life between us

  • Ask questions — the more, and the more challenging, the better. (Click here and here for a whole slew of possibilities — noticing that I’ve tried to answer all of the foundational questions and many of the more nuanced ones across these pages, allowing you to focus in on what’s most important to you when we meet. A quick acknowledgment that there are some ideas and terms on these pages that I do not endorse or use — e.g., the incredibly harmful concept of ‘client non-compliance’ or the oddly out-of-context and dangerous notion that therapists “leave their…biases and beliefs at the door” — but they’re, for the most part, anti-oppressive and do provide comprehensive lists of questions that go well beyond the status quo!)

  • Tell me about any past therapeutic experiences — including what allowed for deep, good work and what didn’t

  • Share what’s brought you to therapy right now and your intentions for our (possible) work together, and

  • Most importantly, attune to your initial felt sense about our potential to be in real, open, resonant relationship.

It will also be a time for me to gauge whether my approach and experience could align well with your specific needs — which we’ll discuss with full transparency.

I encourage you to take time after we meet to reflect on our fit and consult with additional practitioners, but — in some cases — we might decide right then and there to move forward! Either way, we’ll assess your session rate during our consultation so you have all the information you need to make a fully informed decision (learn more about my fee structure and setting process here). Finally and relatedly, before we meet for our intake session (if indeed we do), I’ll provide you with a detailed informed consent form. You might notice that almost all of its content has been covered on this website, and should feel like we explored important issues further — in ways specific to you and your therapeutic vision — during our consult. At the beginning of our first official session, I’ll address any additional questions or concerns that might have come up for you as you read through the document in preparation, and we’ll ensure that you’re feeling ready to begin our journey — grounded by the explicit and implicit knowledge that informed consent is an intentional, continuous process.

These 60 minutes are an offering of immediate, unconditional care — because this is where change begins. We’ll talk with more depth and candour with the constraints of brevity and money purposefully set aside — and, hopefully, this allows you to feel more comfortable making a decision. If we decide to work together, we’ll be able to engage more intimately and specifically during your intake and initial sessions having spent this integral foundational time together — which, in turn, should allow you to feel relief, safeness, and trust sooner in our process. And if we don’t end up working together, spending a meaningful amount of time with a therapist who wasn’t the right fit will better attune you to what and whom you’re looking for right now…

You can visit the FAQ page to learn more about why my consultation sessions are 60 minutes.

INTAKE SESSION — 90 MINUTES

Our first session will be more pre-structured than our consultation and future sessions. This is a time for me to begin to learn about who you are in all your dimensions, so that we can move forward with your therapeutic process in holistically attuned, responsive, and accountable ways. There’s deep value and intention in devoting an extended session to intake, particularly because I won’t ask you to independently fill out a lengthy form requiring intense and intimate detail (though there will be a bit of necessary intake paperwork, which I’ll send you to complete before we meet!). Instead, we’ll take on this meaningful work together — nurturing trust, understanding, collaboration, and connection through the process.

Building upon what you shared in our consultation session, I’ll ask you open-ended questions about your presenting issue, your relationships, your sense(s) of self, your intersectional identity and social location, your values, your bodily experience, your resources and support system, your holistic well-being, and your healing intentions that will allow you to set our path, pace, and purpose. There is so much I’ll want to know; we will not get to everything: we’ll take space and make time for what matters to you most in this moment, knowing that the rest will emerge…

WEEKLY SESSIONS — 60 MINUTES

While healing isn’t linear, the flux of our work will be cradled by a trauma-informed, phased approach: beginning with stabilisation, resourcing, nurturance, and safeness; moving into deepened awareness, holistic contact, processing, and metabolising; and flowing through integration, meaning-making, and regenerative being, belonging, and becoming.

The foundation-building and initial assessment phase of our therapeutic process will continue over our first few sessions. We’ll dig deeper into your healing intentions and collaboratively map your therapeutic path, while we simultaneously ensure that you begin to feel more centred, grounded, supported, and purposeful. I’ll come to understand you more intimately and multidimensionally as I earn your trust, we nurture our developing bond, you become more comfortable sharing and experiencing vulnerably, and we use what’s happening in the room within and between us to examine, understand, and shift what’s happening in your life outside of it (and back again). We’ll tend to what brought you to therapy now and any emergent acute needs initially, then responsively deepen into complexity, trauma work, reintegration, and expansion — knowing that newly pressing priorities may arise over the course of our work together, requiring flexibility and adaptation.

For the first six months at minimum (if, of course, we work together for this long), I suggest that we meet on a weekly basis. At this crucial stage, bi-weekly (or more infrequent) sessions simply don’t allow for the continuity, connection, and commitment integral to radical healing.

Visit the FAQ page to learn more about why my standard sessions are a full 60 minutes!

EXTENDED SESSIONS — 90 MINUTES

I offer the option of 90-minute sessions for clients who want more time than the standard hour — either weekly, or at specifically pre-arranged times based on shifting circumstances and needs (for one-off or multiple sessions). Depending on my schedule, there may be times when we can responsively arrange for an extended session on the day of your appointment.

Visit the Fee Structure & Process page to learn more about how and why I discount the cost of extended sessions!

THREE & SIX MONTH CHECK-INS — FREE, 30 MINUTES

The intentionality, relational-experiential process, and responsiveness of our work will be in continuous focus — and I’ll always, always want and welcome your feedback. You can tell me if I didn’t understand, I disappointed or hurt you, you’re confused by something I said, or you need me to do something differently; I will hear you fully, acknowledge what you’re experiencing with tenderness and accountability, and be changed…and this will change you too. But at the three and six month marks specifically, we’ll set aside a dedicated half-hour to explore how you’re feeling and thinking about our therapeutic process to those critical points in time.

Our three month check-in will give us an opportunity to responsively shift and adapt early on — with what should, by then, be a solid foundation of trust, understanding, collaboration, and connection (and if not, it will provide us with a necessary opportunity to focus in on this and address it). Our six month check-in will allow us to reflect upon and celebrate the work we’ve done to that point — and, if you so choose, to move into (even) deeper, (even) more complex work with renewed insight, embodiment, integration, energy, and direction.

These dedicated early check-ins are one of the many ways we’ll nurture our healing relationship and process. They’re also an integral learning opportunity for me — to come to understand how I’m meeting and missing you in your exquisite specificity, as well as to develop and deepen as a practitioner and as a person. Honouring this full context, the check-ins are offered at no cost and take place entirely separately from your therapy for the week — ideally directly before or after your session (depending on your preference), or at a separately scheduled time that’s more convenient.

Beyond the six month mark, we’ll collaboratively determine a check-in process that makes best sense for the specifics of our relationship and work. For example, we may choose to keep checking in with a dedicated 15 minutes every six months, or you may find that feedback and response are so well-interwoven with our therapeutic process that you prefer to leave aside formal check-ins unless you or I request one. Whatever we decide, check-ins will continue to be offered free of charge.

I know just how risky it can feel to share feedback with someone you rely on to really show up, listen, and care. Carving out and protecting this time — before we even meet — is a promise I’m making to you…and one that we’ll both need to tend to.

ENDING THERAPY

I can’t tell you here and now when therapy might end (visit the FAQ page for a more fulsome examination of this necessarily incomplete answer). But we’ll know that it will — keeping this in heart and mind across the duration of our healing relationship, explicitly exploring it together during check-ins and whenever necessary.

We might do five months of meaningful work that allow for the precise iteration(s) of healing you needed at this time. You might (re)find stability and self-compassion after nine months, taper off to a few months of bi-weekly sessions to test the waters of sustainable change, feel strong and whole and decide to take a break to focus on other aspects of your life, and re-turn two years later during a difficult transitional time. Or after many years of radical work moving and deepening through issues related to attachment, trauma, identity, (be)longing, and purpose, you may sense that our collaboration — fruitful, secure, and sacred as it’s been — has come to a bittersweet endpoint, and you’re ready for a different healing relationship or growth process.

Whenever and however it comes, please know that we can — and should! — discuss this integral stage of therapy openly. We’ll approach our ending with the same care, accountability, and intention as we did our beginning and middle: claiming space to honour the time we spent together in transformative communion — and the ways you’ll continue to unfold into re-becoming beyond it…

“Radical care provides a roadmap for an otherwise.”

— Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart & Tamara Kneese