The Kind of Practice We Wanted to Build

Before I founded Waypoint Psychotherapy in 2023, I had been a solo practitioner for a number of years. Once it was time for me to expand my counseling practice to include other clinicians, I had to decide what kind of practice I was going to build, what its core identity was going to be, and what its values were going to be. The decisions that I made at that time shaped what Waypoint would become, especially as it added the voices of the people who came to join me here over the years.

One of the most important things that I wanted to create when I established Waypoint was a true private practice that carried forward the values of its founder while allowing the practice to grow through the voices and strengths of the therapists who joined it.

In the last ten years, I've watched mental health counseling change as private practices vanish and are replaced by large, corporately owned organizations. Now, many of those organizations employ excellent therapists whom I know and respect very much. This is not suggesting that you can't get good therapy from one of those practices. But as an organization grows, something can sometimes be lost.

Those organizations tend to become impersonal, and it becomes more difficult to know what kind of therapeutic experience you're likely to have. I wanted Waypoint to remain personal and intentional.

Waypoint is a true private practice. If you're seeing me, you're seeing the owner of the practice. If you're seeing Taylor, Lindsay, Dana, or Camille, then you know the owner is only a few steps down the hall. We know one another. We consult with one another. We support one another. We share with one another. We cultivate relationships with one another.

This isn't an accident. It's part of the culture we wanted to create.

Now certainly every therapist at Waypoint has their own personality and their own interests and their own clinical style, and that is a strength. But we also share a common vision of what therapy should be. We aren't simply professionals renting offices in the same building. We are a team. We learn from one another, challenge one another, and support one another because we believe our clients benefit when our therapists don't practice in isolation.

And together, we understand the most important point, and that is the client.

One of the things I've come to believe over many years of therapy is that people change most deeply when they feel genuinely known and understood.

Every person who comes into counseling has a story. It may be one of grief, anxiety, struggling relationships, shame, trauma, or years of feeling unseen. Therapy is about much more than reducing symptoms. It's about taking the time to understand the person who is sitting in front of you.

And that requires something many people rarely experience, which is safety.

One of the most transformative experiences that a client can have in therapy is telling the truth about themselves—the parts they are proud of, the parts they are ashamed of, the things they've done, and the things that have been done to them—and to discover that they are met not with judgment, but with curiosity, compassion, and unconditional positive regard.

That doesn't mean therapy is never challenging. In fact, good therapy often involves difficult conversations, even gentle confrontations. Sometimes growth requires hearing things we would rather not hear. But challenge and judgment are not the same thing, and I believe people are far more willing to face difficult truths when they know that they won't be shamed for having them.

That is the atmosphere we want to create at Waypoint, and everything flows from that.