Your initial appointment is an Evaluation Session intended to assess your issues and concerns and to help us begin a plan of care for you and your family.  Evergreen operates on a sliding scale based on ability to pay.  Our base (minimum) fee is $55/session.   Full fee is never more than $95/session.   Most fall somewhere in between.   The basic guideline followed to determine a per-session fee is $1 per $1K of the household's annual gross.  Example: If your household's combined annual income was $65K/year, the corresponding fee would be $65 per session.   We do our very best to "meet people where they are" financially.  We operate on a "pay as you go" basis.  We ask that your payment be made either by cash or check.

You should know that we consider our work to be short-term intensive.   It is our clinical goal to help you achieve your objectives on as efficient a time-table as possible.

It is our observation and experience that the costs of people not getting the help they need are far greater than what that help actually costs.  For example,  premarital counseling costs a small fraction of what most couples spend for their wedding day (an event that will last just a few hours--average cost:$19,800!)   And counseling benefits can impact a couple for decades, long after the confetti is swept up and that last piece of cake is put in the freezer.   If a marriage is ended by divorce, tens of thousands of dollars are typically spent on attorneys fees and court costs.  

For this reason, our divorce prevention  work may well be one of the most cost effective services we provide.   The cost of staying together and repairing relationships is minimal when compared to the alternatives. This does not even consider the fact that loss of one's marriage or family has no real pricetag.  Its cost is staggering in terms of the emotional, physical, financial and spiritual toll involved.

INSURANCE:  Many major medical policies don't see pastoral counseling as a medical intervention and therefore, don't cover it.  And, they often require a psychiatric diagnosis to classify that service, which Evergreen is hesitant to do.  All policies differ and there is no uniform answer to all insurance inquiries.  What we can do is generate statements on request toward deductibles, spend-downs and for reimbursement purposes.  And we keep the cost for services down by design to make them affordable to just about everyone.

Well-known author Pat Conroy (Prince of Tides) once wrote:  "With every divorce is the death of a small  civilization."  So the question really isn't: "Can I afford to do this?"  The real question is: "Can I afford not to?"