When life has become more unmanageable for you or your loved one(s). The symptoms you are experiencing are having a negative impact on your daily functioning, or others have expressed concern it is impacting your daily functioning. Your challenges may be from life transitions or more ongoing and chronic problems and both are fine reasons to seek counseling. Be open minded, it might not be so bad. 

A supportive and down to earth environment to express your thoughts and feelings in a non judgmental space. It can be casual and inviting.

The intake is a information gathering session for me to obtain more background information about you, what brings you to counseling, and the goals you desire. The intake also provides you a chance to get to know my counseling style and some initial impressions on if I might be a good fit as your counselor. Future counseling sessions have less questions and there is more direct work being done together. 

Yes, to a varying degree. Not all will get resolved in your therapy appointments alone. There will be things I will encourage you to work on outside of sessions from what has been learned during your appointments.  I will assist in providing you with psycho education, increased insight, and coping strategies yet that will need to get applied and worked on outside of sessions for optimal benefit. 

That varies on each individuals needs.  Therapy may be short term ( a few sessions or few months) or it may be more long term (over a year) and we will work together through out the whole process on length and what fits your needs. With factors such as external circumstances, diagnosis, other underlying conditions, or openness to treatment as things to take into account. It is also important to not have any judgement about how long the process may be. The length of counseling is not intended to carry any judgements on how "severe" your problems are, rather create a treatment plan with best prognosis for healing. 

I am bound by HIPPA, needing to keep your information private unless you have given written consent to do otherwise. Some exceptions may be the minimal information required to submit your claims to insurance  (if used) or concerns for safety, court ordered, or mandated reporting. Given I am a mandated reported when there is risk of harm to yourself or others I may need to breech confidentiality to help with safety.