Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if this is right for me?
If you're considering therapy, you've already made an important step toward healing your relationship with food. The next step is finding a therapist that feels like a 'good enough' fit. At Freedom To Be Therapy Ltd we believe that the relationship you develop with your therapist is central to helping you grow and find food freedom.
To help you decide, we offer an initial consultation session with your potential therapist. This is an opportunity for you to get a feel for your new therapist and for us to find out more about you, your life, your relationship with food, what has brought you to therapy, and what you're hoping to get from it. It's also an opportunity for you to find out more about therapy and how we work so you can make an informed decision about whether to proceed with regular sessions. Initial consultation sessions are a bit more formal than our regular sessions, as we need to be thorough in asking questions in order to tailor our approach to your needs. It is possible to have two initial consultation sessions, depending on what we decide on our first meeting.
Once you reach out and have been in contact with your potential therapist, they will share more details about the duration of the and cost of the session. Some therapists prefer to do longer initial consultation sessions.
How long is a therapy session?
Each session is 50 minutes long, this is known as a 'therapeutic hour'. Your therapist will monitor the time as we go, and let you know when we are nearing the end of our session so that you can sit back and focus on getting the most out of our time together.
The frequency of sessions depends on your individual needs, but generally we strive to arrange for weekly sessions as this ensures consistency so that you can develop a strong relationship with your therapist and help you to find the freedom that you deserve.
Fees and payment
My fee is £100 / session.
Once you get in touch and we arrange for an initial consultation, I will will send you all the information you need to make a payment via bank transfer.
I invoice on a monthly basis in advance. This means that we agree on sessions at the end of each month, and then you are sent an invoice on the 1st of each month, which is payable by bank transfer.
I charge for all missed sessions - unless I need to cancel, in which case you'll be reimbursed on your next invoice. I strive to create a working schedule that allows for some movement when life inevitably gets in the way of our arranged sessions - this isn't always possible though.
Do you offer online sessions?
Online sessions are conducted via an encrypted, telephone and video application Zoom instead of in person. I have been running sessions exclusively online since March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. If you have never used Zoom before, we can help you to set it up on your computer or smart phone. Otherwise, all you require is a pair of headphones and a safe and confidential place to talk.
What is Non-Diet / HAES?
Non-diet processionals will help you to understand what diet-culture is and to untangle your diet-mentality. A core belief in the non-diet world is that bodies are not the problem, diet-culture is because it sets us up with a set of moralised rules about food, bodies, and appearance that are founded in discriminatory ideas about fatness. Diet-culture has us believe that we cannot and should not trust our bodies and it capitalises off of this by offering us a multi billion dollar industry worth of 'solutions' (aka diets, weight loss programmes, 'wellness' or 'lifestyle' programmes etc).
Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellors help you to distance yourself from diet-culture by applying the framework of Intuitive Eating, as created by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. Every single one of us is born with the capacity to listen to our bodies and trust what they need. We all have the innate capacity to eat intuitively, sadly we need some support to disentangle ourselves from the rules and beliefs that diet-culture has imposed on us -- often since childhood when well-meaning loved ones were trying to teach us how to eat. Intuitive Eating is a set of 10 principles that supports us to return to our innate capacity to eat intuitively.
I align my therapeutic approach with a Health at Every Size® approach, which means that I am committed to offering evidence-based support that respects body diversity and honours difference and diversity. A HAES® approach supports you to build critical awareness about the social and cultural pressures we experience via diet-culture, and to integrate compassionate self-care in to your life so that you can expand your definition of health and wellbeing -- and ultimately, your world. It also means that I am committed, both personally and professionally, to learning about social justice issues, weight stigma, anti-racism, and social disparities that contribute to discrimination and systems of oppression so that we can understand how we have unwillingly contributed to causing harm to marginalised folks -- and commit to doing better.