If You're Driving to Me, Don't Book Fifty Minutes

When your marriage is hurting, one hour a week can feel agonizingly slow.

You finally open something up, touch something raw, and then the session ends. By the time the next week comes round, life has flooded back in and you are standing in the same spot.

That is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of arithmetic.

Why my standard session is already double

Every session I run is 100 to 110 minutes. That is the mini-intensive, and it is the only standard format I offer, because fifty minutes with a distressed couple is enough time to pry something open and nowhere near enough to do anything useful with it.

The first forty minutes are usually the version of the argument you have both rehearsed in the car. Everything worth having is underneath that. On a fifty-minute clock you never quite get there — you arrive at the edge of it, and then somebody has to leave to collect a child.

So when you compare my rate against someone else's, compare it against two of their sessions, not one.

If you are driving to me

A good number of the couples I see are not local. They come from Carl Junction, Neosho, Pittsburg, Miami, Galena and Quapaw — anywhere between eleven minutes and three quarters of an hour each way.

If that is you, a weekly appointment can quietly become its own problem. Two hours in the car for two hours in the room, every week, on top of work and children, is a schedule that eventually loses.

For couples in that position I can put the time together into a longer block instead — a double session, or a four-hour block in one sitting. You come less often and get further each time you do.

This is not a retreat, and it is not a residential programme. I do not run those, whatever the internet insists therapists in my position are supposed to offer. It is the same work, arranged so that the drive is worth making.

What the extra time actually buys

Not more talking. Fewer interruptions.

The thing that changes a relationship is usually a single moment, and it tends to arrive late. One of you says a true thing out loud that has been sitting unsaid for years, and the other one actually hears it, because by then we have slowed everything down enough for hearing to be possible.

In a short session you can spend weeks arriving at the door of that moment and never walking through it. In a longer block there is room to get there, stay in it, and then do the part that matters most, which is whatever happens immediately afterwards.

It also helps in a genuine crisis — after an affair, or after a conversation about separating — where seven days between sessions is a very long time to be left holding something.

Who it is not for

If you can comfortably get to Webb City on a weekday evening, come regularly instead. The longer block solves a travel problem. More hours in a row are not automatically better.

And if there is active violence, untreated addiction driving the crisis, or one of you has already decided to leave and wants a supervised place to announce it, a longer block will not help. I would rather tell you that early than after your money is spent.

Cost, and HSA or FSA

The standard session is $180 for 100 to 110 minutes, which works out at roughly $100 an hour.

A four-hour block is $360. That is about $90 an hour — slightly cheaper per hour than coming twice, which is deliberate. If you are driving forty minutes each way, the arithmetic ought to reward the longer visit rather than punish it.

Private pay only. I do not bill insurance.

Therapy with a licensed mental health professional is often an eligible expense under an HSA or FSA, and I can give you detailed receipts to submit. Plans differ and I am not the right person to advise you on yours, so check with your provider rather than assuming.

Booking

Emotionally Focused Therapy, couples only. In person at my office in Webb City, MO.

If you are weighing up the drive, I have written about what it looks like from Carl Junction, Neosho and Pittsburg.

I answer my own phone and I call back within four hours. Ask me whatever you are still wondering about.

Call or text 417-768-9089 · shira@radicalrelationshiptransformation.com