FAQ

Who can come to Jolliffe Counseling Services for counseling?
How does counseling work and what is your style?
How long does counseling take?
What does a typical counseling session look like?
Why don’t you take insurance and what are my options for making counseling more affordable?

Who can come to Jolliffe Counseling Services for counseling?
The short answer: most anyone! I’ve counseled a variety of people of diverse races, gender expressions, sexual orientations, ages (10-75+), military experiences, socio economic classes, and political views. I pride myself on being as professionally non-judgmental and neutral as possible. The clients who have the best results are simply ready to talk about making changes in their lives and have some small degree trust in the counseling process.

How does counseling work and what is your style?
As I see it, traditional talk-therapy relies on semi-structured conversation between clients and counselors to address and resolve client-defined problems. I have seen and helped clients resolve a variety of intra- and interpersonal challenges. Some of the most common problems I’ve helped individual clients explore include depression, anxiety, identity confusion, and lack of personal meaning. In terms of couples, I have experience with healing infidelity, exploring sexuality, negotiating non-monogamy, and improving general conflict resolution and communication skills.

I employ an eclectic approach based on existential counseling theory, which seeks to help clients explore how the human condition impacts daily life; cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which seeks to help clients explore how thoughts impact feelings and actions; and family systems theory, which helps couples and families in particular explore and improve relationship dynamics. When appropriate, I also draw from Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to deepen discussions about love, compassion, and happiness. When appropriate and with clients’ permission, I make use of secular mindfulness and creative visualization techniques to support our discussions.

My counseling style is generally relaxed and open, although I am more directive with couples and when I think individual clients will benefit.

How long does counseling take?
Although it is impossible to determine exactly how long counseling takes, recent studies have suggested that meaningful improvement can occur, on average, in 13 sessions (Flückiger et al., 2022). The majority of my clients stay well beyond 13 sessions, usually because it takes more time to have problems resolved satisfactorily and/or because new challenges to explore in counseling arise.

Crucially, my job is to help you learn the skills and take the risks necessary to improve your well-being, not to make you dependent on counseling forever. If I don’t think counseling with me is being effective, I’m ethically bound to work with you to stop counseling and find other treatment avenues to pursue.

What does a typical counseling session look like?
A typical session is 55-minutes long and includes checking with you about what you have been thinking, feeling, and doing since the last session. I try to keep my sessions feeling as natural and earthy as possible, only using special counseling techniques that I have been trained in and when I believe they might be useful.

What insurance plans do you take and what are my options for making counseling more affordable?
At the moment, I only take PacificSource (commercial plans only). Under certain circumstances, I can offer superbills to access out-of-network (OON) benefits. PacificSource (commercial) and superbills require official mental health diagnoses, regular medical justification, and insurance-grade documentation. More often than not, insurance plans do not cover ordinary couples counseling focused on communication and non-medical issues.

I accept checks, and debit, credit, HSA, and FSA cards.

Modern Health clients are welcome to schedule with me through the Modern Health app.

Spring Health clients are welcome to schedule with me through the Spring Health app.

To make counseling more affordable, I offer limited sliding scale spots and bi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly appointments. Please reach out for more information.