Whether we’re celebrating Advent, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, the arrival of Saint Nick, or good old-fashioned family-togetherness, it’s only natural that we look forward to this time of year with hope and eagerness in our hearts.
But sometimes all of that hope and eagerness can begin to look an awful lot like expectations. You know, the kind that inevitably lead to disappointment, frustration, or sadness. They seem especially potent around the holidays.
At Change, Inc. St. Louis Counseling & Psychiatry, we’ve gone of out our way to build a superior team of mental health experts. One of the things you may notice about our team is that we are…how do you say it? Fresh-faced? Sprightly? Something like that. This too is a deliberate hiring strategy on my part as the founder and clinical director of Change, Inc. at-large and a 13-year veteran of the mental health industry.
In January of 2012, a man jumped into the back of my best friend’s car and put a gun to my head.
We’d just left a work event and I had parked on a dark side street. My friend had offered to drive me to my car so I’d “be safe,” but before I could get out of her car we were robbed at gunpoint.
When people sign up for counseling services in St. Louis, one of the most frequently asked questions on an initial phone call or email is, “What is this going to cost me?” In a day and age where managed care has trained us to think very little about our own care and to just trust them to sort things out, people are often surprised at rates for varying practices across the St. Louis area and don’t really have an accurate sense of what they “should” be paying.