Kurt Aring
Therapy experience was fine. Never felt like it had much effect on me. For a counseling service, they are abjectly terrible communicators. Everyone is remote except the therapists themselves, they answer all incoming calls via an answering service that can’t WAIT to transfer you to a line which is absolutely never answered and forces you to leave a voicemail and wait. God help you if you have an urgent matter to resolve. They do not care. In another example of their dubious communication skills, by the cancellation/rescheduling policy they assess a $40 fee, a lot for anyone using insurance, for same-day changes. They are flexible about this because, as I was told, “life happens”… until they aren’t, because I guess they have an arbitrary understanding of the extent to which one’s life is allowed to happen before it’s suddenly verboten, which they either refuse to or are unable to communicate to clients. Again, THERE IS NO WARNING WHEN THIS CHANGE HAPPENS. I was given a few hours’ notice that the $40 fee on my account for a prior same-day reschedule I had to make to care for my sick 5-year old had to be paid or my appointment the next day would be cancelled. This situation comes up for us sometimes, as it does for anyone with young children, and they had been reasonable in the past, allowing me to attend my appointment and discuss the matter with them. I had planned and expected to do exactly this regarding this fee, which I’d known about for weeks. Imagine my surprise when they’re now refusing to discuss the matter directly, the appointment gets cancelled because I predictably do not pay the fee my expectations had been set to believe would be negotiable at my appointment, I can’t schedule a new appointment until I do pay the fee and suddenly, we’re all about policy. It’s hilarious they think I’d want to come back after this, but that’s beside the point. The eventual email response I got stated this was done because of a past history of late rescheduling. I’ve rescheduled in this manner maybe 3-4 times in the nearly two years I’d been a client. One, to call that a “past history” is ridiculous, and two, to do this without any attempt at communication beyond making one of your hapless receptionists leave me a voicemail a few hours before the deadline when to this point you’d been nothing but reasonable is impossible to interpret as anything other than a punishment, as someone getting mad and deciding they were going to teach me a lesson, because how dare I have circumstances I had no control over necessitate a same-day appointment change a handful of times! Fortunately for me, we live in a wonderful world where I don’t have to let these flip-floppers discipline me as though I were a sniveling dog, I can just go somewhere else. That’s exactly what I’m going to do, and you should do the same.