Therapy FAQ for Menlo Park & Palo Alto Clients

I am an out-of-network provider.

Working outside of insurance means your treatment stays between us. Insurance companies require a psychiatric diagnosis to authorize and reimburse therapy, that diagnosis becomes part of your permanent medical record, and insurers have the right to audit your records at any time. For professionals in certain fields, that kind of documentation can have real consequences.

It also means I'm not working under insurance-mandated limits on session frequency, treatment length, or what we can work on. Private pay gives us the flexibility to do thorough, unhurried work that actually produces lasting change, not just putting out fires within whatever window the insurer decides to cover.

I do provide superbills, and the reimbursement process is more straightforward than most people expect. Before you even book, you can check your out-of-network benefits instantly using the benefits checker at the bottom of your screen, which returns your deductible, coinsurance rate, and an estimate of what sessions will cost you after reimbursement. Once you're a client, I can file claims directly on your behalf, or if you prefer to manage your own, the system includes a mobile app that submits a claim from a photo of your superbill in under a minute. You can also visit my Fees & Insurance page for the full picture. If you have questions about any of this, we can walk through it on the call.

Internal Family Systems is a model that understands the mind as made up of multiple parts, each with its own perspective, history, and way of trying to protect you. Whether it's the anxiety that won't let you sleep or the voice telling you you're not as good as people think, IFS doesn't treat those as problems to overcome. It treats them as parts that developed for reasons, usually early ones, and that respond very differently when they're understood rather than pushed past.

Most conventional approaches, including CBT and traditional talk therapy, try to change how you think or teach you skills to manage how you feel. That can be useful, but for a lot of people it stays at the surface. IFS goes deeper, working with what those parts are actually protecting. That's where the patterns that haven't budged through years of insight or willpower tend to finally shift. I'm a Level 2 trained IFS therapist through the IFS Institute. You can read more about how IFS works here.

One client told me he went from going into every conversation with his wife knowing he was going to freeze up, to that almost never happening. Another went from getting overwhelmed and shutting down to being able to sit with something hard and say "that's a scared part, I know what that is now." Another described finally understanding why he reacts the way he does, and said that understanding gave him something he'd never had before. He told me "I make sense to myself now."

Sometimes the results show up somewhere nobody was tracking. One client came in overwhelmed and anxious, worn down by emotional swings so intense that people had dismissed her as dramatic. What she told me months later surprised me: the debilitating headaches she'd had every single day for years had stopped completely. She hadn't mentioned them once. I didn't know they existed until she told me they were gone.

Most people who reach out aren't sure, and that's not a reason to wait. The consultation call is low-stakes by design. You don't have to have your reasons sorted out before we talk, and a 15-minute call is all you're committing to. If anything, the uncertainty itself is worth bringing to the call. I'd rather you reach out before you're ready than wait until things get worse.