Telehealth · all of California
Online therapy in California
My whole practice is telehealth. Not a version of the office moved online for a season, and not a lesser option offered when the calendar is full. This is how I have chosen to work, and it is how I intend to keep working: by secure video or audio, with adults, seniors, couples and families who are physically located in California. You do not come to a waiting room. The hour comes to whatever room you are already in.
Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.
What a session actually looks like
A few minutes before we meet, you get a link. You click it and you are in; there is nothing to install and no account to make. I ask what town you are sitting in, you tell me, and then we begin the way any session begins, which is that I ask how you are and I mean it. We meet weekly to start with, most often for fifty minutes. Couples and families sometimes want longer, and we talk about that rather than assuming.
The screen does less than people expect it to. Ten minutes in, most people stop noticing it. What they notice instead is that they are in their own chair. Their own light. Their own cup of tea going cold beside them. You cry in a room where you already know where the tissues are, and when the hour ends you are already home. That last part matters more than it sounds like it should. A great deal of therapy actually finishes in the twenty minutes after the session, and by video you get to spend those twenty minutes sitting still instead of merging onto a highway.
It also means I meet you in your life rather than in my office. Sometimes you carry the laptop to show me the garden you cannot make yourself weed anymore, or the chair nobody sits in now. Sometimes a dog puts a head in your lap halfway through a sentence and something in you softens that would not have softened in a clinical room. I do not treat any of that as an interruption. It is information, and it is often the most useful thing in the hour.
You do not have to drive home from the hardest hour of your week.
Where you live in California does not decide what care you can have.
The practical parts, said plainly
Where to sit
Somewhere with a door, if you have one. A bedroom, a study, a parked car in a quiet place, a corner of the house when everyone else is out. Headphones make a small room far more private than it feels. If there is genuinely nowhere unheard, tell me and we will work with that rather than around it.
Privacy on your end
I use a HIPAA-compliant platform on my side, and I keep my own room private and closed. What I cannot control is your side, so we talk about it directly in the first session: who is home, who could walk in, whether the device you are using is shared with anyone.
Your location, every time
At the start of each session I ask what city or town you are physically in. That is a licensing requirement, not curiosity. I am licensed in California and can only work with you while you are in California.
Phone and audio are real options
Some people think better without a face on a screen, and some weeks nobody wants to be looked at. Audio-only is a legitimate way to have a session, not a downgrade. Grief in particular is sometimes easier to speak into a phone than into a camera.
If the connection drops
I call you. We agree on that in the first session and exchange numbers, so there is nothing to figure out in the moment. If the video will not come back, we finish by phone, and the time is not lost.
How we would work
We start with a free 20-minute consult by phone, text or video. You describe what is going on and what you are hoping for, and I tell you honestly whether what I offer fits it. If it does not, I will say so. There is no pressure in that call and nothing you owe afterward.
If we go ahead, we meet weekly at a standing time, because a rhythm does something that scattered appointments cannot. What I draw on depends on you: Internal Family Systems for the parts of you pulling in different directions, EMDR when a memory still has a live charge in it, somatic and mindfulness work when the body is holding what words are not reaching, hypnotherapy, expressive approaches, and my own Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning when an old loop keeps closing on itself. Grief is my primary specialty, and it runs through much of the rest.
None of this depends on being in the same room. It depends on being reliably met at the same hour by someone who remembers what you said last week.
- Anywhere in California: the coast, the Central Valley, the far north, the desert, the mountains, a town with no therapist in it
- Adults, seniors, couples and families
- Weekly sessions by secure video, or by phone and audio when that suits you better
- Evening options for people who cannot leave work midday
- Grief, anxiety, trauma, life transitions and the long patterns underneath them
- Superbills provided if you plan to submit to out-of-network benefits
Questions people ask about working by video
- Does therapy by video really work as well as being in a room?
- In my experience of it, yes. What carries the work is attention, and attention travels. I can see your face closer than I could across an office. You can hear my voice in your own ear. What changes is the periphery: I do not see your whole body settle into a chair, and you do not see my whole body lean in, so I say out loud what I would otherwise have shown you. I will tell you when something you said landed hard, or when I noticed your shoulders come up. Naming those things is not a workaround. It often makes the hour more honest than it would have been in person.
- Why do you ask where I am at the start of every session?
- Because my license is a California license, and therapy can only be provided to a client who is physically in California at the moment of the session. That is not a formality I can waive. So each time we meet I will ask what city or town you are sitting in, you will tell me, and we will move on. It takes five seconds. If you travel out of state, tell me before the session rather than during it, and we will reschedule for when you are home. If you are moving out of California, say so early and I will help you find someone licensed where you are going.
- What happens if my connection drops in the middle of something hard?
- We plan for it before it happens, in the first session. You give me a phone number, I give you mine, and the agreement is simple: if the video fails, I call you. You do not need to email, refresh, or wonder whether I am still there. If we cannot get the video back, we finish the hour by phone. Time lost to a genuine outage is not time you lose. I would rather stay with you on a scratchy phone line than tidily reschedule you in the middle of a sentence.
- I live in a small town with no therapist in it. Can you see me?
- If you are in California, yes. That is much of why I work this way. There are counties in this state where the nearest therapist with an opening is two hours of driving each way, and where the one local option is somebody you would run into at the market. Distance stops being the deciding factor by video. What you need is a room, a door, an hour, and an internet connection or a phone. Where in California you live does not change how the work goes.
Start from where you are sitting
If you have been putting this off because of the drive, the parking, the childcare, or because there is nobody nearby you would want to sit with, that reason can be set down. Text or email and we will find a time to talk. Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.