#040: 9 Ways to Pay for Counseling
You want to go to counseling, but a massive barrier stands in the way: The price.
Therapy is not cheap. So, how are you going to pay for it? We tackle that question and more in this episode:
9 practical tips on how to pay for counseling
How much does counseling actually cost?
The info and next steps you need to pay for counseling, so you can heal and feel whole again
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#012: Counseling: How It Works and Why It Helps | Dr. Julia Sadusky, PsyD
How much does mental health care cost? Part 2: Finding Affordable Psychotherapy
World Population Prospects 2019, Volume I: Comprehensive Tables
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TRANSCRIPT
Transcript produced by artificial intelligence. Please pardon any errors!
So you are someone, you know, are thinking about going to counseling, but one huge barrier that you're facing is the price therapy is not cheap. So how the heck are you going to pay for it and to make things where maybe you're in a tough situation right now, maybe you're out of work or maybe you're just struggling to get by.
Maybe you're a student that doesn't really have an income. How do you deal with this? The first thing to know is you're not alone. The price of therapy, the price of counseling is a huge barrier for so many people. One article said this that said for the one in five us adults with a mental illness, about half of them go without treatment deterred by out of pocket costs.
And other obstacles such as finding an in network. Provider. So using some really basic math it's estimate, there are 331 million Americans at this recording. Now I understand that it's not just including adults, it's taking into account kids, but let's just keep the math simple and let's say. 330 million Americans.
The article I just shared said that 20% of them let's say has a mental illness. So it's roughly 66 million Americans. Then it says that half of that population, which is 33 million Americans with a mental illness. Are not getting the help that they need because of the obstacle of paying for counseling.
So again, that's over 30 million Americans estimated that aren't going to counseling, even though they have a mental illness because they can't pay for it. They don't know how to pay for it. Maybe they can, but they just don't know how. To go about it. And again, those numbers just include people who technically have a mental illness that doesn't include the huge amount of people.
Huge number of people who don't have a mental illness, but still want or need the benefits that counseling, uh, Offers, perhaps because they want to heal from some past trauma in their life, such as the trauma of, you know, coming from a broken home, or maybe they went through some abuse in their life, or maybe they just wanna deal with some other pain or problems in their lives that isn't technically classified as mental illness.
So that number of 33 million goes up a ton. And then when we look globally, of course, that number is astronomically higher. So this is a. Problem, whatever your situation, whatever your reason for going to counseling. If the price of counseling is preventing you from going to counseling, we hear you. And this episode is especially for you.
It's gonna help you a lot where you're gonna get out of it. We're gonna talk a little bit about how much does counseling actually cost. We'll give you nine common sense tips on how to pay for counseling. And by the end, you're gonna have the information that you need. To make a decision on how to pay for counseling and the next steps that you need to take in order to get counseling.
So you can begin or continue the healing process. So lots of good stuff ahead. Keep listening.
Welcome to the ReSTOR podcast, helping you heal and grow from the trauma of your parents' force or separation. So you can feel whole again. I'm your host, Joey Pelli. Thank you so much for listening. This is episode 40. Again. I mentioned we're gonna give. Tips on how to pay for counseling. Before I dive into that, I just wanna let you know that we are now accepting questions for the show.
Some of you have already submitted questions. Thank you so much for doing that. But if you wanna submit your question, uh, we'll answer those on the show by either me or by my guess. And some of the benefits you can really ask anything that you want, a anything related to growth or healing or coping in healthy ways instead of unhealthy ways, anything related to.
The trauma of the breakdown of your family, maybe you're in a situation where you feel stuck or you're unsure how to handle the pain or the problems from your parents' breakup, or maybe you're unsure how to go about healing. We can help you there. Maybe, you know, someone who's going through all this, you love them, you lead them and you wanna give them some help, but you're not sure how to go about it.
We can help you there too. So, whatever your question we're gonna. Specific and practical answers right here on the show. If you wanna submit your question, it's really simple. Just go to restored ministry.com/ask Joey again, that's restored ministry ministers to singular.com/ask Joey, you're just gonna fill out the form with your question, and then when you submit it as we're able.
Will answer your question on the show. It's that simple. So go to restored ministry.com/ask Joey.
All right. The first thing you need to know before we get into the nine tips, when it comes to paying for counseling is that therapy is not forever. Typically this is a temporary thing that you go through for some season. In your life. So don't approach it, thinking that, okay, once I commit to it, I'm gonna be going to therapy for the rest of my life.
You might need to go back at some point and there's nothing wrong with that. That's fine. But it is really a temporary thing. And Dr. Julia Sadusky who we had on in episode 12, she said that typically takes four. Six sessions to start seeing an impact to start feeling better. If you're going there for maybe some, you know, messy emotions that you're dealing with.
So just four to six sessions, that's typically, you know, if you go once a week, that's a month to two months. So it's really this temporary investment in yourself in your mental health and feeling healthy and feeling. Whole again. And so that's how we really need to look at it. When you look at it as an investment, that's going to pay off, we're gonna get a return on our investment in the long run.
And if you just think in terms of your career, just to take one simple example, if you feel broken. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, if you're having a hard time focusing, because a lot of the pain and the problems in your life, it will obviously affect your work. You won't be as effective at your job.
You're gonna struggle. Maybe even to get a job in the first place, you're gonna struggle to, to move up, to learn new skills, to make more money. The list goes on, you get the idea, but let's say you were to invest some money sometime some effort, because it's not an easy thing to go through healing. If you were to do.
You could be in a much better spot in just three months and six months in a year to the point where you are able to focus better, you don't feel depressed, you don't feel anxious, or maybe you have the tools to better handle. When you do feel anxious. When you do feel depressed, you're gonna be much more effective at your job.
And then hopefully you can move up. You can make some more money, you can be more productive and your life overall, you're gonna be in a much better spot as well. So. Take the approach when it comes to therapy that you're investing in your future self, you're putting money into yourself, so to speak so that similar to an education in the future, you're gonna be able to do better.
You're gonna live a better life. You're gonna make more money. You're gonna do better at your job. You're gonna have more successful relationships. And on and on and on. And that's another example we could look to your relationships, right? Your friendships, your family situation, even your physical health across the board.
Like you could end up living longer. If you end up dealing with this pain, these problems that you're dealing with in your life by getting some help from a professional. And so, again, look at counseling as an investment. You're not just burning money, you're not throwing it down the drain for no reason.
You're gonna get something in return. If you find a good counselor and you put in the work and on the opposite end of that too, I, I kind of hate to mention this, but we need to face this truth that these issues that we're dealing with today, Could get more serious. In fact, they likely will get more serious if we don't get help and they might be even more expensive to treat in the future in the long run, you know, you could take a physical example, right?
Let's say I were to hurt my leg in some way. And instead of going to the doctor, instead of getting a surgery or healing it through therapy of some kind, let's say, I just say, ah, I'll be fine. I'll be fine. And it goes on for years and years and years. And let's say I'm I'm okay. Like I'm getting by. But then in the future it gets worse and it gets worse and it gets worse to the point where now I'm having major leg issues and I need a serious surgery to fix those issues.
That's gonna cost way more money. The recovery's gonna take way more time. You get the idea. We could look at a marriage too. So let's say you're married or you wanna be married one day. And if let's say in that marriage, you're having a lot of issues. You're having a lot of problems, but you don't really want to spend the money to go to marriage counsel.
It could be. I hate to say this, cuz it's such a scary thing that I fear a lot too it's could be that you end up getting divorced because you just never deal with your problems in your marriage. And a divorce is certainly much more expensive than what you'd spend on marriage counseling. I I've known couples to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorney fees.
It is insane. It's such a lucrative. Business for attorneys, for other people who are monetizing on families getting divorced. It it's insane. So. It's better. It's less expensive to treat the problems early on. It's easier to treat them early on than it is to let them get more serious in the long run. So again, it's not just an investment, but it's actually in a way insurance.
It's a way to help you to save money in the long run as well. So, That aside, how do you pay for it? The, the first tip is really obvious. Get your insurance to pay for it. And this is of course, assuming that you actually have insurance, maybe you're on your parents' insurance. How do you go about though figuring if your insurance will pay for it?
Uh, the easiest thing that you can do is just find your insurance companies phone number on Google. If you don't have it, just Google. The name of your insurance company and give them a call. This call's probably gonna take 10 to 15 minutes. You're probably gonna sit on the phone a little bit. When you call them, might take a little bit to, to get to the right location.
But once you talk to someone, you're gonna want to ask them a few questions and I suggest grabbing some paper, grab a pen, or just open up the notes app on your phone to write some of these questions down. If you need to pause this and come back to it, go ahead and do that. So. There's just a few questions that you want to ask the person from the insurance company.
You can just ask them what mental health benefits do I have with my insurance policy. So what mental health benefits do I have? It's the first question. And then you could ask, okay. Let's say where to go to counseling. What would I pay out of pocket? They might not be able to give you an exact amount, but they could probably give you some sort of range based on your insurance policy so they can give you a good idea.
Okay. Maybe you're gonna pay $20 outta pocket or $50 outta pocket. If you were to go to counseling. Next question you can ask is how many sessions per year? Would they cover there might be a limit there. So make sure you ask them to clarify that for you. You could also ask, do you cover counselors who are out of network where the counselor that you would see is not one of the counselors that they would recommend?
It's not one of the counselors that's within. Their network, but they might be able to pay for it. So you wanna talk to them about that and that's gonna really depend on your insurance plan as well. Another question, do you offer reimbursements? Like maybe they can't cover the costs initially where the counseling practice would submit the bill to the insurance company, but if you were to pay for it out of pocket, they could give you a reimbursement later.
On, and you would need to, you know, keep track of all the bills and everything like that, but it doesn't take too much work. You would submit them to the insurance company. They would be able to, you know, give you some money back, right. You would check or put some money into your account. So that's a good question to ask too, but there might be some limit on how much you can be reimbursed per year.
So that's another thing that you wanna ask as well. So ask about that. And then lastly, I would probably ask, is there a diagnosis that is required? What that basically means a diagnosis is just some document, right? From the counselor saying that you have a condition that needs to be treated, that's it?
And that might sound kind of scary, right? Like, are you gonna be labeled as a freak? Are people gonna find this out? Really? It's just a procedure that the insurance company needs the counselor to go through in order to cover the cost in order for them. To cover the cost. And if you are concerned, maybe about the possibility of it affecting you in the future, you can ask your counselor about that.
You can ask the practice about that and say, who would have access to this information potentially in the future. Tell them about your concerns and, and just ask them, you know, who would see this information in the future. If I do get some sort of diagnosis saying. You know, I deal with a needing disorder or I deal with depression, whatever, whatever situation you're dealing with.
Now, keep in mind, at least in the us. And a lot of other countries have very similar laws. HIPAA it's basically the privacy laws around medical records. They can't just. Give them to anyone like you're, you're very protected in this way. And they, we take it in the states like very, very seriously, like people have been fined.
I don't know if people have gone to jail or not, but people have been fined lots and lots of money for leaking sensitive, um, medical records for people that wasn't an authorized sharing of, of that medical record. And so basical. You're really protective. There's really only one situation that, that I'm aware of where maybe a judge could mandate that the counselor would have to release certain documents to them or come and testify in court.
And so if that's a serious concern for you, you could talk to the counselor and say, you know, when exactly would this happen, what would it look like? But for most people it's really not a big issue. It's really something not to be concerned with. But if you are. Talk to the counselor about it. And if you know, a lawyer or something like that, and you're comfortable talking with them, you could ask them as well.
But like I said, for most people, this isn't a real issue. And again, if you are really concerned, talk to someone who has more expertise, I don't pretend to be a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer. And so, uh, talk to someone who knows a law who can guide you in that situation. But from my point of view, just so you know, let's say someone were to find out about this.
Some. People everywhere struggle with a lot of problems, like a lot of pain, a lot of problems in their lives. And so my take is if you are getting help for some issue in your life that does not make you weak. That actually makes you strong. Like, I look up to you for going and getting help. It shows me your strength.
It shows me that you're not defined by your problems, but you're working through them. And so if you have questions about that, make sure to, to ask your counselor, they can clarify a lot of that. So again, just to go through those questions, if you're writing them down, ask them what mental health benefits do I have.
If I went to counseling, what would I pay out of pocket? How many sessions per year, would you cover, do you cover counselors that are out of network? Do you offer reimbursements? If they don't, you know, pay for it upfront, if they don't cover it and then is a diagnosis required? Those are just some good questions you can ask and make sure that you're asking them to a point where you can understand what they're telling you, because insurance is super confusing.
So make sure that if the person you're talking to is giving you these really weird answers that you don't understand, don't say, oh, okay. Got it. Don't pretend. Just say, I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're saying. Is there another way that you can explain that? Or, you know, maybe the person. Doesn't really know what they're talking about has to be transferred to someone else and, and they can do that for you.
That's not something that you should feel embarrassed asking about, make sure that they're giving you the help that you need. And they're being clear with your answers until you understand it. Keep asking until you understand it. Talk to someone else. If you have to now one challenge that's come up.
We've talked to people about this. Let's say you're on your parents' insurance and you wanna go to counseling. You know, you need help, but you don't want your parents to know. That you're going to counseling because maybe you just don't wanna have that conversation with them, perhaps a lot of the pain and the problems that you're dealing with stems from what's happened in your family.
You might really not want to have that conversation with them yet talking about, Hey, this is what I'm going through. I need help. That's real struggle. We totally get it. So a few options there. When you're on the phone with the insurance company, you can ask them, you know, what sort of privacy rights do I have since I am on my parents' insurance?
Like, are they gonna get a letter in the mail saying. Oh, you know, your son, your daughter is going to counseling. They're being treated for this. You can ask them what exactly, what information would my parents see? They can give you some answers in that again, ask until you understand, um, another option, which this is harder.
Is, you can have a honest conversation with one or both of your parents. You could say, Hey mom, Hey dad, I'm just going through a hard time right now. I'm struggling with some stuff. I don't really wanna talk about it, but I do wanna get some help. And so I'm looking around for a counselor. I'm going to try to figure out, you know, what the insurance will pay for.
Just wanna let you know, cuz I know you'll be made aware of it. Let's say the insurance company would tell you that they will notify your parents in some way, or maybe your parents will see it on their bill. You can keep it generic. You can keep it simple, but you can just let your parents know. So there's not this big dramatic issue that comes up.
If you can't face your parents, talk to 'em face to face on the phone, then. Maybe just send them a letter, just let them know. And, and that's all you would really need to do, because if you're on their insurance, you have the right to go through with that. And, uh, and there's nothing to be ashamed of. Now, if that's totally not an option, let's say the insurance company says, well, your parents are going to know that you're going to counseling.
You really don't want them to know. Then you're might need to use one of the other options that we're gonna. In this episode, tip number two is ask your employer about employee assistance program. So if you have a job it's possible that your employer might pay for counseling. Even if your insurance doesn't cover it, or maybe you don't even have insurance.
So what I suggest here. Is go and talk to your HR department. You can send them an email. You can give them a call and you can just ask them, Hey, do we cover counseling? I'm just curious. I was thinking about going to counseling. You really can keep it generic. You don't need to give them a lot of info there.
You can just ask the question and see what they say. And again, HR people, they have a lot of confidentiality. Safeguards in place. So they're not just gonna walk around your office or tell your boss or other leaders in the organization that you're asking about counseling, that they have to keep that stuff quiet.
And so, uh, rest assured there that if you were to ask them, it's not unusual and they're supposed to keep that quiet tip number three, use college campus counseling. Or maybe some community counseling center. So when I was in college, I did this, I used my college counseling center, uh, just a bunch of trained counselors that were available to us students just to be clear, this is not to be confused with academic counselors or advisors.
These were, uh, trained therapists who were able to, you know, help us with the issues that we were dealing with and the cost for me, I remember it was just $10 a session and I didn't have much money at the time at all. And so I went every other week. And it was really helpful. I did that for a year and a half, so I definitely put some money into it, of the little money that I had at the time, but it, it was certainly worth it.
And the challenge there, of course, if you were to go to your campus counseling center, is, are they any good? You know, are they gonna give you good advice? Are they gonna give you moral advice? Let's say you have a faith background. You wanna make sure, you know, are they gonna say things that maybe doesn't align with what I believe.
That can be super challenging. I'm gonna talk about that a little bit more at the end of this episode, but it's just good to be aware that maybe you're gonna have to try it out and see how it goes. And sometimes in those counseling centers on campuses, just know that you might have a newly certified counselor.
Or maybe it's a student who's working to get their certification, they're working to get their hours. So again, it might be worth a try. You might have to just test this out, run it as like an experiment to just see how it goes. And when you're interviewing the counselor at the beginning, cuz it really is an interview, uh, from you to them.
You're seeing if they're the right person to help you, you can ask them a ton of questions and just see. If that's gonna be an issue. If you come from a faith background, maybe they don't, is that gonna be a problem at all? And you can just be totally upfront with them and they should be able to give you some straight answers.
By the way, if you're not a student at a college, you still might be able to go on campus to get counseling. So look into that. If you're near a university, you can, uh, give the counseling center a call and just see if they offer. Anything for the community at large. And if they don't, or you're not near a university, a community counseling center in your area might be a more affordable option.
And so just get on Google and search community counseling center. Now this is not something that I'd recommend as like the top option, but if you're in a desperate spot, if you're in a tough spot with money, And you need some help. Now let's say you're dealing with some serious condition or even your symptoms are just really hard to deal with right now.
Do it, just get the help that you need right now. And maybe the long run that counselor, that practice that you're going to isn't the best fit, but it's better if you really need it to get the help now than to just wait longer and longer and longer to try to find the perfect counselor that you might never.
And, you know, in that practice or another practice, perhaps it's possible that group therapy could be a good option for you. Now, group therapy might sound kind of scary, but it could be a much more affordable option for you. In some cases you could end up paying half as much as you would. If you were to work one to one with a counselor, tip number four.
Find pro bono counseling. So pro bono is just a fancy word, meaning that a counselor would do it for free. So counselors in certain situations will offer free counseling to people who really need it, meaning they would look at your financial situation. You'd probably have to give them certain information about your financial situation.
And they would say, okay, I'm willing to do this much free counseling with you. So that could be an option. Maybe there's a practice, you know of that. You wanna try, you could ask them that, or you can give. Campus, or you can ask that community counseling center and see if they would do pro bono counseling.
Uh, you also, maybe there's a counselor you're interested in. Maybe they could refer you to someone who they know who does some pro bono work as well. Tip number five, pay out of pocket. So let's say your insurance doesn't cover it, or you don't have insurance. You could always pay out of pocket if you're making enough money to do that.
But a huge barrier here that we've seen is that you might not feel like it's worth. Like, is this gonna actually work? Is this a good use of my money? We totally get that. And the truth is you're gonna get out of counseling. What you put into it. If you put in the effort, if you find a good counselor, you're gonna get something out of it, but it's really important that you put in the work.
And it's also important that you actually put some skin in the game that it costs you something, because the truth is that you're gonna work harder and you're gonna value your therapy much more. If it actually costs you something. If it's not just a handout, something you get for free, you're gonna be more motivated and you're probably gonna end up completing counseling.
Quicker than if maybe mom or dad were paying for it or someone else is paying for it. And again, there's nothing wrong with going to counseling for free. If you, you have that need in your life right now, nothing wrong with that, but it really does change things. When you take money, you're hard earned money out of your pocket and you're paying it down again.
This is an investment we're not just throwing money down the drain. Um, but it's really helpful when we're putting money. Into it, knowing that we're gonna get something out of it, we're gonna just value it that much more. And I remember Dave Ramsey telling a story how I believe they would pay for their team members to go to counseling with their spouse if they needed it.
But, uh, if I'm remembering the story, right, they didn't really see results right away, but then eventually they started not paying for it a hundred percent. Maybe they're putting 50% into it. And at that point they started seeing much more results than before, because. Their team members started to realize, man, if I don't get some of this together, if I don't start working on my issues, start solving some of these problems with my spouse.
I'm gonna be putting out a lot of money. And so, uh, it motivated them to change it, motivated them to really work on their growth. And that is what can happen with you too, if you're paying out of pocket. So there's a lot of value in paying out of pocket. And there's a few things you can do again, if you can't.
Overall, and we're gonna get into some of those right now. Tip number six, ask the counselor if they have a sliding scale fee. So a sliding scale fee is basically where they would reduce their regular fee by some percentage to help you out. How much is counseling though? Regularly? It could range anywhere from $75 to $150, or maybe if you're seeing a specialist.
Or you're in an expensive city like New York or San Francisco that can go up to 200 or $300. And that's for typically a 45 minute session. Now you might be thinking why in the world? Is it so expensive? A few reasons. One therapists obviously go through a lot of training. Like if you get your PhD going through all that schooling takes a ton of time, a ton of effort and it isn't cheap.
So they obviously go through a lot of training. They deserve to be paid for all that, but also they need to make a living. Like they just like any other job, they need to make money. And if they're running their own practice, there's a ton of other expenses that they need to manage in addition to just doing their counseling.
So they'll need insurance, they'll need to pay any people that work for them, just like any other business. And so there's different reasons why. It can be so expensive, but like I mentioned, for people who need it, they will be able to work with you in most cases. Not always, but in a lot of cases, they'll be able to work for you on that sliding scale free.
Now they can't usually give it away for free, but maybe they could reduce it from $150 to a hundred dollars or to $75. So you may be able to get some sort of a deal like that. And basically what you can do here to figure out how much you can pay. Just do a quick calculation, try to look at your budget.
If you have one or just estimate how much you can pay per month for counseling. So let's say that's $200 per month that you can afford to do counseling. And then from there, what you wanna do is divide that by how many sessions you would have in a month. So if you go once a week, that would be of course, $50 per session.
Or if you were to go every other week, let's say that's, you know, a hundred dollars. A session. And then when you talk to the practice, when you go in to see the counselor, maybe you do a free phone consultation. You can ask them about their sliding scale fee and you can negotiate with them a little bit.
Now negotiation can be scary, but understand here that you're looking for a win. Win situation where you need the help and you're willing to pay some money to get the help they're trained. They can give you the help that you need and they need to make money. And so it really is a win-win situation. So don't be afraid to ask and if they come back and they say, no, we can't do it.
That's totally fine. Maybe you go elsewhere. Maybe you figure out a way to pay. By the way when you're asking a question like that for a sliding scale fear, typically when you're just going to counseling for the first time you fill out all these forms, they call them intake forms. Typically, they're gonna ask you some questions about your financial situation and just understand that you are not obliged to tell them everything about your financial situation.
You can decline telling them certain things. You can tell them. Now I'm not comfortable sharing that information. Or, you know, if you, if they're asking on a form how much you make, you can just say. Not applicable or just put in zeros in the field instead of giving them that information, it's totally your call.
If you're willing to share that, that's fine. They may require more of that information if you're asking for a discount than if not, but, uh, you really don't have to give it to them. As far as I know in my experience of doing counseling for years, you don't have to give that information to them. Tip number seven, adjusts appointment frequency.
So the less that you go, the less expensive it obviously. Well be now, typically counselors wanna see you every week or maybe every other week. So if you are going every week, if you were to adjust it to every other week, then it obviously becomes less expensive per month. If you go to every three weeks, that could be good too.
Maybe once a month, usually less frequency isn't advised. But it is a possibility. It, it, depending on your situation, you can talk to your counselor and see if it would be a good idea. If you need more help, more support, obviously you don't wanna be waiting that long, but maybe you can get by doing every other week and maybe having some friends or an online support group or something that you're checking in with more frequently to kind of fill that void while you're waiting to go back to your counseling session.
Another option here too. Aside from going less frequency is actually doing an intensive. So an intensive is where you do counseling for a week or, or two weeks. And in the end it could not always, it could end up being actually cheaper to do that. You would need to save up for it. It would be a big amount of money to pay all at once.
Or maybe you can figure out some other way. Pay for it. But in episode 37, we had Margaret que on and we talked about, uh, her therapy a little bit and she does it intensive. So basically you would go to her, uh, office to her town. You'd stay there for, I think it's a week. I think sometimes she does two weeks.
And she, you know, would treat you, you would work with her for the whole week and, uh, you would pay, you know, a larger amount in that case. Now let's say, I don't know what she charges offhand, but let's say it was like $2,000. Now that's a lot of money to pay all at once. But let's say you were to do maybe 40 hours of counseling over that week or two weeks.
That would be about $50 an. Now again, I don't know what it actually would be in reality, but if that were the case, then it could be substantially cheaper to do that than to go, you know, to a counseling practice where they're charging you a hundred dollars an hour going every other week. So you can just talk to your counselor.
You can take a look at some of the options if they have intensivess. If you wanna do that, if you wanna go a little bit less frequently, you can just talk to your counselor and see, and just make sure that they know that you would wanna do that in order to save money and just see what they say. Tip number eight, get on a payment plan.
I'm not a huge fan of debt. I don't think it's wise to go into debt in most situations, but getting on a payment plan might be smart if you're in a tough financial situation. And typically if you do this with a counselor, there wouldn't be any interest involved. And so the, the risk is really not there that there would be with another type of loan.
Basically, what you'd do in this case is you would pay your counseling bill off slowly. Maybe you'd pay $50 or a hundred dollars a month. One counselor I worked with in the past did this for me. So I would go to counseling. I think typically it was like twice a month. And so he would add up the time to my bill.
And then let's say, I think I did it for about six months. In that case, I would pay a certain amount. Per month, let's say it was a hundred dollars until the entire bill was taken care of. And so that can be a good thing you can do where you're getting the help that you need, but you're paying it a little bit more slowly.
And so you need to ask your counselor about it. Some counseling practices won't be willing to do that, but some will. And in certain situations they may have never tried that before. This might be something new for them. So you might need to sell it a little bit, but it could be a good thing. It could be an attractive thing, both for them.
And for. Tip number nine, asks someone to cover the costs for you. This is super humbling. Some of you are immediately opposed to this idea. You're so turned off by it because you're just so independent. And I get that I'm that way too. But if there's no other way that you can pay for counseling and you really need the help, don't be afraid to ask someone to help you out because you know, you can't afford it.
So you can just ask them and say, Hey, you know, I'm in this tough situation right now. I can't afford counseling, but I really need it. Is there any way that you can help me out and give them of course the freedom to say, no, they do not have to do this. Of course, if they do want to help you, one really important piece to this is make sure that it's clear whether you are paying back that loan.
Let's say it's a loan. Or if they're just giving it to you as a gift, it's gonna save so much time, so much frustration, so much trouble by making sure that you talk about that. And maybe even putting it into writing, even if it's just an email or text message that you save, it's gonna help so much to put that into writing, to get clear in that first so that, you know, you're not ending up in this weird situation where.
Thought someone was giving you a gift, but in the end it was actually just a loan. So make sure to get clear on that and don't expect someone to pay a hundred percent for your counseling. Like I mentioned before, it's usually better if you're paying for some of it, because again, it needs to cost you a little bit in order for you to really benefit from and to be motivated.
To go through with and take it seriously and make sure to take that money seriously, if they're gifting it to you, because that's nothing that should be taken lightly. They're likely sacrificing a lot in order to give that to you. And so we need to make sure that we're honoring them by putting in the hard work and really working to heal.
So that's it. Those are the nine tips I'm gonna run through them quickly. Again, the first one is get insurance to pay. Second, ask your employer about employee assistance programs. Third use college campus counseling, or maybe an affordable community counseling center. Fourth find pro bono counseling, someone who will do it for free because your situation five pay out of pocket six, ask the counselor.
If they have a sliding scale fee, seven adjust appointment frequency eight, get on a payment plan and nine ask someone to cover the cost for. Something that I would love to do in the future that we can't do right now. But we'd love to do in the future is offer grants to pay partially for counseling, for people who qualify for it, who need our help.
Again, we're not there yet. We don't have the funding to do that at this point, but join our email list@restoredministry.com to stay tuned for things like that. Again, it's something that I'd like to do at some point in the future. Um, if we can, I, if we get the funding to do something like. So we'd love to hear from you guys too.
What, what creative ways have you used to pay for counseling? And, and did we miss anything? Let us know, email us@contactrestoredministry.com or you could just fill out the form on the website again, contact restored ministry.com. We'd love to hear from you. In closing a, another huge barrier that a lot of people face when it comes to actually going through with counseling is finding a good counselor.
And I totally understand that. And when we think of counselors and talk about counselors at restored, we are typically looking for three main things. We're first looking for someone who's competent, who's good at their craft. They know. What they're doing, they have the expertise, they have the experience, they have the training, all of that.
They need to be competent next. They have to have a good understanding of the human person because they're trying to treat very deep and often complicated issues. And so they really need a good understanding of the human person. And lastly, there need to be someone who appreciates and understands how damaging the breakdown as your family can be.
There's a lot of counselors out there who really don't understand this. They don't appreciate it. They don't know the research on how damaging it can be and they might end up saying harmful things to you because, well, you know, you're struggling with the breakdown of your parents' marriage and they're just maybe making light of it saying, well, now you.
Two homes and twice as many gifts and all that sort of stuff, that's just not helpful at all. So you wanna find someone again, who's competent, someone who understands a human person and someone who can understand and appreciate what would be so harmful about the breakdown of your parents' marriage. Now, for those of you who come from a faith background, you might also want someone who is a Christian, let's say.
So that goes into that second point. Having a good understanding of the human person. One thing I wanna say on that note, though, a very competent counselor who maybe doesn't share your same faith background should still be able to help you. There shouldn't be a conflict there in, in a lot of cases, not in every case, but in a lot of cases, if they're not able to do that, to be objective and help you, even if they don't come from your faith background, then that says that they're not extremely competent in what they do just to be.
But at the same time, I totally understand if you wanna go to someone who does come from a faith background. And so go ahead and look for that. You can find people you can ask around we're building our network, which I'll I'll tell you about in a second, but a few pointers when it comes to looking for a counselor, understand if you're looking for a Christian counselor, that that doesn't guarantee that they're good at what they.
It's like, you know, finding a Christian plumber, a Christian doctor, it's like, great they're Christian. Awesome. That doesn't make them good at what they do. They need to be good at what they do. So just make sure you're separating those things. Don't assume that just because they're Christian, because they're Catholic, that they're good at what they do.
Make sure that you're, uh, finding someone who who's also very competent. Take a shopping around approach. You know, you can interview a few different counselors, do the phone consultations, maybe have two or three options. And then from there you make a, a good decision. So don't be afraid to take those consultations, to just take this approach that I'm testing it up.
We'll see how it goes. You don't need to commit fully to someone before you really even know if you click with them. Well. And so test it out, see if there's one of them who you can really relate to. You thought really got you, understood you and you can help. And again, don't be afraid to ask a ton of questions when you're meeting with the counselors to really get an understanding of where they're coming from again, on the aspect of, are they competent?
Do they understand the human person? Well, are they gonna give you, you know, good advice. And then lastly, do they understand how damaging it can be to come from a broken home? If you want more info about that checkout episode 12, with Dr. Julia Sadusky. In that episode, we talk about how many sessions it takes to, to start feeling better.
We talk about the, the number one factor that determines whether counseling is gonna work for you or not how to find the right counselor for you. Uh, so you give some questions that you should be asking. To a counselor before you commit to doing therapy with them and then how to make the most out of counseling, like what you need to do in order to make the most out of it.
Again, that's episode 12.
So at ReSTOR, you probably know we are building a network of counselors that we trust that we vet that we recommend to you. And so if you wanna find a counselor, some of the benefits of using our network is that it's gonna save you a lot of time and effort in searching. For a counselor, we're gonna connect you with a, a trained profession who can give you the help that you need, give you the tools that you need to heal so you can feel a hole again and again, these are people that we vetted that we trust that we recommend the counseling network at this time at this recording is not fully ready, but it will be.
And so if you wanna get on the wait list, you can just go to restored ministry.com. Coaching again, restored ministry, ministry, singular.com/coaching. You just fill out a simple form and then we're gonna connect you with a counselor. And so thanks for your patience. As we build that out, it's a huge project that we're working on, but it's really important.
Again, that's restored ministry.com. Slash coaching. The resources mentioned are in the show notes@restoredministry.com slash 40. Again, restored ministry.com/four. Thank you so much for listening. Hope this has been useful for you or maybe someone, you know, if it has been, I invite you to subscribe and to share this podcast with someone, you know, who could use it.
Always, remember you are not alone. We're here to help you feel whole again and become the person that you were born to be.
