Fees

Most couples want to know the fee before anything else, and quite reasonably. It should not take an email exchange to find out. Every fee at Therapy Atelier is set out below, with the length of the session attached to each one.

Therapy Atelier is a private couples therapy practice. Fees are the same whether we meet in Mornington, across Melbourne, or online.

Weekly Couples Therapy

90 minutes — AUD 350

Couples Intensives

Three-Day Intensive — AUD 5,800

Five-Day Intensive — AUD 7,800

Retreat Intensives

Available on private enquiry

Why ninety minutes, and what that means for the fee

Sessions here run to ninety minutes rather than the usual fifty. The fee reflects that length, the preparation and clinical thinking that surround each session, and a practice kept deliberately small.

An hour is a difficult container for two people. By the time each partner has said what has happened since the last session, the hour is spent, and the work that matters — slowing a familiar argument down enough to see what is underneath it — has barely begun. Ninety minutes allows the session to move past the account of the week and into the pattern itself. Couples who have had therapy before often notice this first.

What the fee covers

The fee is for the session and for the work surrounding it: preparation before you arrive, notes and clinical thinking afterwards, and the reading and consultation that a complex couple sometimes requires between appointments. You are paying for a senior clinician’s sustained attention to your relationship, not for a room.

There is no charge for asking questions before you begin, and no obligation attached to an enquiry. You are not asked to commit to a set number of sessions.

Medicare, and private health insurance

Couples therapy is not covered by Medicare. This is not a feature of this practice but of the system: Medicare rebates apply to individual mental health treatment under a plan from a general practitioner, and relationship work between two people falls outside it. No couples therapist in Australia can offer a Medicare rebate for couples work.

Some private health funds offer a partial rebate under extras cover, and the position varies considerably between funds and policies. It is worth asking your own fund directly what it allows. A receipt is issued for every session with whatever details your fund requires.

Intensives, and a different arithmetic

A three-day intensive is AUD 5,800 and a five-day intensive is AUD 7,800. Those are substantial figures and they deserve to be looked at plainly.

A three-day intensive holds roughly the clinical hours that weekly therapy would take some four to five months to accumulate — and holds them consecutively, which is the point. Work does not have to be rebuilt at the start of every session, momentum is not lost to a fortnight of ordinary life, and a couple in real difficulty is not asked to hold their situation intact for months while an hour a week slowly catches up with it.

Intensives suit couples facing something urgent or entrenched: a recent discovery, a decision that cannot wait, a pattern that weekly work has not shifted. They do not suit everyone, and where an intensive does not appear appropriate I will say so before it is booked rather than after. More about how intensives run.

Beginning

A confidential consultation is the place to start. It is a conversation about what has been happening and whether this practice is the right one for it — including an honest answer if it is not.