FAQs

$250 for a 50 minute individual session

$285 for a 50 minute couples/multi-person session

Longer sessions are available for a corresponding increased rate.

My session rate supports my capacity for number of sessions each week and allows me to offer premium quality care to every single one of my clients in those sessions.

Each client is entitled to a Good Faith Estimate and will receive one along with their intake forms.

I believe this is the course of action that is most aligned with my values as a practitioner and keeps me in integrity with the type and quality of care I believe clients deserve.

By not taking insurance, I am not restricted in how I provide care, and I do not have to pathologize what are often coherent, rational nervous system responses to the triggers of a difficult and overstimulating world. Your therapy remains private, confidential and free from insurance limitations, allowing me to focus on what’s best suited for you—not what an insurance company dictates I must do in providing care.

I emphasize quality over quantity, serving fewer clients for deeper, holistic work. Self-pay therapy is flexible and fully customized to each client’s unique needs. This model of therapy is designed to prioritize you as a whole person, not just as a diagnosis or as an appointment on a schedule.

I do not provide superbills.

Superbills (detailed itemized receipts to submit to insurance for reimbursement) still must contain a mental illness diagnosis and the type and length of sessions attended. This option does not resolve issues concerning confidentiality and your medical record. It offers more protection in that the insurance company cannot read my notes and gather specific information about our sessions, but a diagnosis is still added to your record, along with your appointment history.

Since I do not diagnose clients in my practice, my system does not automatically generate receipts that are acceptable as superbills to insurance companies. Therefore, any superbill must be individually created by me, which involves time for making the clinical decision about most appropriate diagnosis, as well as time and labor for making and updating the superbill document itself.

Additionally, many insurance companies make it difficult for clients to receive out of network reimbursement. Historically, that has looked like insurance companies asking for different diagnostic codes, different billing codes, and other changes to the details of the receipt itself before any reimbursement is offered. In the past, this has meant I actually have had to make 2-4 superbills (the original, and then 1-3 edited/updated superbills after the original) every time a client requests a superbill. This process is very time-consuming, taxing to my own nervous system, and drags me back into a dynamic with insurance companies that I very intentionally chose to exit when I left insurance panels.

Investing that significant amount of time and labor and energy into client care, continuing education, or other activities that are aligned with my values as a clinician is a better and more valuable use of my time and energy. I am a more effective clinician and more regulated human when I can operate my practice independently and free from bureaucracy.

It is my practice to not provide a superbill for these reasons.

Yes! You may use your HSA/FSA account and card to pay for your therapy sessions. While receipts are usually required to show that you spent the money on an accepted service/product, those receipts do not require a diagnosis, just a line item of what you paid for. My system automatically generates receipts that are compatible with submission to HSA/FSA accounts, so I am comfortable providing those receipts to you if you need them.

All major credit cards, HSA/FSA cards, cash, and personal checks. The price for sessions is the same no matter how you pay.

If you choose to pay with cash or check, please know that an active, functional credit card is required to be kept on file for all clients.

We use HIPAA-compliant credit card processors to store sensitive credit card data, and payments are integrated into the health record system (Jane) for easy and secure billing. Once you have added a card, only the last 4 digits of the card will be visible to the practice; we will never have access to your entire credit card number.

Payment is due at the time of the session. Clients may not carry balances on their accounts.

I recommend meeting weekly, at the very least to start out, so that we can get to work on building up trust and safety so we can dig into your reasons for coming to therapy.

Sometimes people worry that if they meet with me every week, they won’t have anything to talk about if nothing major happens between sessions—but that’s the goal! When your mind isn’t leading the charge, it creates space for the body to tell us where there is work to be done. The kind of therapy work I do involves excavating deeply buried issues and beliefs, and rewiring your ways of being, and it is difficult to adequately address those things if we are always dealing with the latest crisis or major event. As a result, I have found that the best, deepest, and most fruitful sessions are the ones when someone comes in with “nothing major to talk about.”

When you have therapy sessions less often, sometimes a chunk of the session is spent on catching me up on what’s happened in your life since we last met, before we can get to the therapeutic meat of the session. Also, it can take a longer amount of time to see meaningful results in your life if we meet less frequently. For example, meeting weekly for 3 months gives you ~12 sessions, whereas meeting monthly gives you 3 sessions—in the same time span, you can get 4 times as much therapy work done with weekly sessions.

At the same time, I do think some therapy is better than no therapy. If you can’t commit to weekly sessions because of time or budget constraints, you are still welcome to meet with me at a different interval that we both agree on after a discussion about your therapy goals. Ultimately, it comes down to what you are looking to get out of therapy and how much you are willing and able to invest financially.

While I can’t give you a clear and precise answer to that question, what I can tell you is that the kind of transformational clinical work I do is not conducive to short-term therapy. Working with the nervous system and the body to expand capacity can be a slower process. If trauma can be understood as “too much too fast,” we need to slow down and respect limits and boundaries in order to heal trauma.

For the issues I specialize in, there is no “quick fix.” The undoing and rewiring of years and decades of trauma, maladaptive coping, and overwhelming lack of trust in yourself cannot be accomplished in 6-12 sessions. You will make progress in 6-12 sessions, but if it took you years to get here, it’ll take more than a few months to make your way out.

If you are wanting a deadline for “finishing” therapy, I may not be the therapist for you. If you are ready to commit to transforming your life and freeing yourself, no matter how long the process takes, we can do great things together.

Your appointment time is reserved just for you. I require 48 hours notice for any cancellations or changes to your appointment. Clients who provide less than 48 hours notice, or miss their appointment, will be charged for the full cost of the appointment: $225 for individual sessions and $285 for couples/multi-person sessions. If you have reserved a longer appointment, your cancellation fee will match what you would have paid for your extended session.

This cancellation policy is really important for my counseling practice because, while a medical doctor can see 35 patients in a day, a therapist like me generally sees a maximum of 4 or 5. I reserve for you, and all my clients, at least a full hour of my time for the session (50 minutes) and clinical notes (10 minutes). If a client cancels with less than a 48 hour notice, I won’t be able to fill that time slot, and I’ll lose that slot from my work schedule. The fee exists simply to ensure that I am paid for my time that was reserved especially for you. The cancellation fee is not a penalty or a punishment, and I want to make sure you don’t view it as such in the event that you miss an appointment. If you’re in counseling long enough, at some point it’ll happen– maybe you’ll work late, maybe you’ll have a health situation to tend to, maybe something unavoidable will come up.

I’m never upset with clients when they miss an appointment. I know life happens. In return, my clients understand that scheduling an appointment with me is like buying tickets to an event. If you miss the event, it doesn’t matter why you missed it, or even if it was your first time, you can’t turn in your tickets for a refund. While some therapists apply their cancellation policy on a case-by-case basis, I personally choose not to evaluate each individual case. Deciding whether to “waive” the fee or not puts me in the unfortunate role of being the judge of what’s “legitimate” or “sick” or “emergency” enough, which impacts the therapeutic relationship negatively. If you know that I “could” waive the fee, you end up resentful when you are charged and I end up feeling I need to justify the reasons for my choice. Consistency in charging the fee ensures all personal feelings are kept out of it, so our work together in therapy can continue untouched by one of us feeling slighted by the other.

My office is located at 5190 Park Ave, Suite 100, Memphis, TN 38119—very centrally located for all clients from Downtown to Collierville, just east of the intersection of Park and White Station.

I am proud to be part of Memphis Wellness Collective and have the honor of sharing space with several other holistic, body-focused practitioners.

Yes! Virtual sessions are available at any time. You can schedule a virtual session in advance, or if you schedule an in-person session and need to switch it to virtual last minute, that is just fine.

You can either click the “Book A Session” button at the top or bottom of this web page, or go to https://kirstencannon.janeapp.com/ to access my schedule and book an appointment. From there, you’ll make a client account and fill out the intake forms that get added to your profile.