All humans want and deserve love and belonging.
A process consultant
for your relationship
My role as a couple’s counselor is to serve as a process consultant for your relationship. I focus on creating a secure and supportive therapeutic environment, understanding and restructuring attachment dynamics, promoting emotional expression and responsiveness, and equipping couples with the tools to build and maintain a healthy, fulfilling relationship. The goal is to help couples break negative interaction patterns, strengthen their emotional bonds, and create a more secure and satisfying connection with each other.
I will not make any decisions about your relationship for you. In helping clients recognize their negative interaction patterns we then set up encounters to communicate in a new and different way. These encounters, called enactments, can help couples to feel hope that their relationship can shift into being more loving, communicative, and connected. Couples’ clients can expect to feel more clarity and insight into their relationship and have help creating a clear path forward towards lasting change.
My role as an individual counselor who uses Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Attachment Theory is to focus on helping clients explore and understand their emotions, relationships, and attachment patterns. This can include:
Building a secure therapeutic alliance which includes establishing a trusting and secure relationship with the client.
Assessment of attachment history which includes helping clients understand their attachment patterns and historical events. This involves exploring early attachment experiences and how they may influence current thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.
Exploring and understanding emotions to help promote emotional awareness and intelligence.
Identifying maladaptive patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that may be rooted in attachment-related issues including, how past experiences can impact present relationships. This also includes exploring relationship patterns in adulthood.
Promoting emotional regulation is a key component of EFT, this may include learning new and functional coping mechanisms to enhance emotional resiliency.
Restructuring negative cognitions includes working to reframe negative thoughts and beliefs that may have developed because of insecure attachment experiences. Interrupting and restructuring this negative thought patters into a more positive and constructive way of thinking of self and others.
Promoting self-compassion to begin creating and fostering a secure internal attachment. Increased self-compassion helps clients feel empowered to create fulfilling relationships and a more secure sense of self.
My rates
I’ve worked my entire counseling career with couples and individual adults. I have dedicated thousands of hours to training, consultation, and supervision in EFT cultivating a deep love and understanding of the model. I have seen positive change happen in many relationships and believe in the work that I help clients achieve. I also have experience and training in Cognitive Behavioral Theory (CBT) which pairs well with EFT to understand then change thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that impair desired functioning.
I honor and work with folks from all races, religions, ethnicities, and cultural experiences
I am not paneled with any insurance carrier. I do not believe that insurance providers know what is best for my client’s or their lives. Working under the insurance model means that insurance companies to have access to session notes, get to dictate maximum number of sessions, and control reimbursement rates. Couples counseling is often deemed not a medical necessity by insurance companies and is not a regularly covered service.
I am happy to discuss this further and the option of providing a superbill for you to seek out reimbursement individually from your insurance carrier.
Couples counseling
60 minute couples session $240
90 minute intake session $360
(beginning 5/1/2024)
Individual counseling
Couples intensive counseling
60 minute session $200
For more information on accomplishing months’ worth of therapy in a day, please contact me.
FAQs
Do you accept insurance?
No, I am not in-network with any insurance provider.
How do I pay for services?
Credit cards are kept in a secure online portal and are charged after each session. Cash is also accepted for in-person sessions.
What is your cancellation policy?
A 24-hour notice is required for all cancellations. Any sessions cancelled with less than a 24-hour notice will be charged the full session fee.
What is a Good Faith Estimate?
A “Good Faith Estimate” explains how much your medical and mental health care will cost. You can ask for this before you schedule a session.
Under the law, health care provides need to give patients who don’t have insurance, or who are not using insurance, an estimate of the expected charges for medical service, including psychotherapy services. Please inform me if you do not have insurance or don’t plan to use insurance, and you will be provided with a Good Faith Estimate.
For questions or more information about your right to a Good Faith Estimate, visit www.cms.gov/nosurprises.
Sarah is a highly skilled couples therapist who strikes a great balance between being empathetic and validating, while also providing honest and direct feedback. She is intelligent and helps clients achieve emotional depth and deeper relational bonds.
- Emily Barben Counselor, MS, LCPC
