Behavioral Health Counseling
 

Searching for a licensed mental health counselor or therapist in Bellingham or the Whatcom county area can be a daunting task. With so many options to choose from it can be difficult to pick the right practice or clinic that best matches your counseling needs. Should you go with a group or a single provider? Most therapy groups in Bellingham are a collection of individual counselors linked for advertising benefit and not clinical cohesion. Usually, solo therapists are limited to their specialties and can't provide you with a wide range of experience and skills. They must refer you to other counselors in the community who may or may not have time to see you.

King Health Associates' clinicians are carefully selected for their unique skills and compassionate approaches. We are supervised to maintain a high standard of care. We value strong professional boundaries, and while you will feel deeply cared for and helped, you will also feel as though your counselor is one of your allies and not enmeshed with you. Ultimately, we want you to grow beyond our services, and trust in your wisdom, relying on your view and truth to navigate life successfully. You will know counseling is working for you when you feel supported and guided, but yet not reliant on your counselor for your happiness.

You know that with King Health Associates you have the advantage of not only having a wide selection of clinicians covering a broad range of specialties, but you gain the advantage of having a clinical director help you select an ideal therapist, and then oversee your care to make sure you are getting the best out of your counseling experience. You can even switch therapists as you progress if you feel you want a different perspective, and yet still maintain therapeutic consistency and comfort.

We invite you to experience the difference at King Health Associates and discover what successful therapy feels like.

*Please note that due to the high volume of interest in our practice, our counselors can often have a waitlist, especially those who work with us only a few hours a week. Our intake team will do their best to get you in as soon as they can, and will also let you know an estimate of how long it might be when we respond to your intake.

Associates and Licensure

Our Associate counselors are counselors who have completed their full educational training and are completing their supervised field training, a process that can take up to seven years (typically two to three) to obtain sufficient supervised sessions to allow the state to remove the "associates" tag from their license. Although each associate provider is an already fully trained clinician, they are regularly monitored during these years by a much more experienced supervisor who will offer regular review and consultation of your treatment, and where appropriate, provide feedback to help the counselors continue to fine-tune their approach and skills. Associates may be new counselors or already have obtained multiple years of experience in working with clients, but in either case, this supervision process ensures that the client avoids any potential disruption of their care that might have otherwise arisen without it. 

Are you better with an associate or a counselor that has completed their supervision? It is not a straightforward comparison, since it is possible to have a counselor who has completed their supervision in two years or less, and an associate who has not yet completed theirs but has three or four more years of experience, so thinking that 'associate' means inexperience is not accurate and not a good way to approach getting the best fit for your needs. The best approach is to take each counselor for what they present to you and go from there. That means reading their bio, watching any videos they have, or even meeting with them for a session and then deciding. 

Clients of associates really gain the benefits of two counselors, one with knowledge of the cutting edge treatments, strong awareness of the newest research, and a whole lot of enthusiasm to help you, and another additional counselor with the wisdom of many more years of experience. Two heads are often better than one as the saying goes. Whereas with a fully licensed counselor you only get that one counselor working for you, but usually (not always!) they have more experience to work from. Which is more useful? It is difficult to say either way. So much of the therapeutic relationship is contingent on the rapport between you and your provider. Your ability to heal is less to do with their training or experience in a particular technique than it is in how comfortable you feel working with them and how much you ultimately trust them to care for and support you.

Molina Insurance?

If you have Molina insurance then please click here to head over to our Molina Counseling page.

Tipping And Gifts

Our clinical policies and licensing ethical standards require that we do not accept tips or gifts in return for any of our services. Please do not offer or leave gratuities. If you wish to, you can donate to a charity of your choice in our name. Thank you for your understanding.