Tai Lee

Rates: $180 / 50-minute session for both individual and multiples. 

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Free 20-minute phone consultation. Please email me at tai@branchingoutwellbeing.com

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Private pay only, with Superbills available for clients to submit to their carrier for out of network reimbursement. Please see our section on insurance for why we have decided to go this route. 

 

Sliding-scale payments available. People with compounding marginalized identity factors are encouraged to request.

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My areas of clinical focus include:

-        Navigating polyamory and other multi-partnered relational systems

-        Neurodiversity and relationships

-        De-escalating high-conflict relationships

-        Gender exploration and transition

-        Processing and healing from traumatic experiences

-        Moving through grief

-        Developing the ability to set and communicate healthy boundaries

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I spent several years providing emotional support in a community of LGBTQIA2+, polyamorous, kinky, BIPOC, and/or neurodiverse members prior to starting school to become a therapist. Supporting people with marginalized identities continues to be my clinical focus. I received my Sex Therapy Certificate and M.A. in Couple and Family Therapy from Antioch University in Seattle.

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A fundamental part of my worldview is that all identities are valid and celebrated. To that end, I work with people of all abilities, races, genders, sizes, and sexualities while continuing to examine and dismantle my own internalized biases. My goal is to provide therapy for individuals and partners that is sex-positive and affirming of all relationship structures, including monogamy and the many ways people have multiple partners.

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My theoretical approach is unique in the mental health field. I take an agency-centered way of looking at well-being, which is now a new model of therapy I have created known as Agency-Centered Relational Therapy (ACRT).

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Having agency means that one has emotional and bodily autonomy, which allows them to feel safe, authentic, and joyful. Distress can be conceptualized as a person experiencing a threat to this sense of agency. Adaptation to external conditions, e.g., existing in a systemically oppressive society, dysfunctional relationship, and/or normative identity archetypes, may require that a person cognitively dismisses their sense of agency in order to comply with sociocultural norms.

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An agency-centered approach looks at these issues through several lenses. A somatic approach identifies how the body respond to agency being threatened or violated, even if one has developed coping skills that invalidates those sensations. A structural approach (not Minuchin’s Structural Family Therapy) looks at the operating rules of the relationship that threaten one's sense of agency. A narrative approach interrogates and deconstructs the patterns that normalize the violation of agency. I work with clients to hold these three different approaches simultaneously. This allows my clients to identify their distress in the moment, what specifically causes that distress in the present and the past, and how to navigate towards more safety, authenticity, and joy. I also incorporate Intersectional and Social-ecological frameworks to help improve client’s relationships with themselves, loved ones, and the world around them.

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I describe my social location as queer, gender-expansive, and with some acquired disability. I am an East-Asian immigrant and have lived in the US since early childhood.

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I am currently only offering telehealth and outdoor sessions (walk-and-talk or sit-and-talk). Outdoor sessions can facilitate deeper processing of trauma and are usually held at a park near University of Washington's main campus in Seattle.

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As of May 2023, I am an approved provider in Washington state with the Therapy Fund Foundation, which provides Black community members with free mental health services while providing equitable pay for clinicians. Please visit the Therapy Fund Foundation website to learn more about this great organization and how to apply for therapy funds.

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I have been invited back Antioch University Seattle to support future classes of sex therapists on numerous occasions. This includes being a small group facilitator for Sexual Attitude Reassessment (SAR) classes in 2023 and 2024, as well as becoming an adjunct faculty member teaching Agency-Centered Relational Therapy in Spring quarter of 2024.

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Social justice and mutual aid: As a function of supporting more diversity in the mental health field, I offer mutual aid to early-career clinicians (graduate school/internship and associate-level) with marginalized identity factors in the Greater Seattle area. This includes counselors, therapists, and social workers. Please email me to inquire.

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