Professional Boundaries in Therapy

Out-of-Session Contact with Therapists

We understand that it is occasionally necessary to contact your therapist between sessions.  If your therapist accepts text messaging, please limit this to scheduling and administrative concerns only.  All of our therapists have secure email in order to protect your confidentiality and you may use that email to communicate securely with your therapist between sessions.  If you request a phone call, please know that calls exceeding 15 minutes are subject to a charge in accordance with our published fee schedule.  In general, communication about clinical issues takes place in your sessions. 

In the event that you are not safe in between sessions, please call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room. Therapists are not able to be reached 24/7, so creating a safety plan in session with your therapist can be an important part of your care. 

Social Media Policy

In order to protect client confidentiality and prevent blurred boundaries, therapists will not interact with current or past clients via online social networking sites. Therapists will show respect to clients by ignoring or rejecting any received "friend requests."

Gifts

While gifts can be a genuine token of appreciation or generosity and feel good to give, they can create troublesome boundary-blurring in the client-therapist relationship. While cards are acceptable, in general, STC therapists will not accept gifts from clients.  Any exceptions to this policy would have to be reviewed by the therapist on a case-by-case basis, but gifts of high monetary value will never be accepted and gifts of even small monetary value are strongly discouraged. 

Court Litigation

STC therapists do not make recommendations to the court and will not become involved in clients' past, present, or future litigation regarding divorce, civil lawsuits, custody or parenting-time disputes, cases with child protective services, etc. as this is outside the scope of our role as clinical therapists.