Every few weeks I get a call from someone looking for couples therapy.
Usually they're in the middle of something big like infidelity that's just been discovered, or a constant battle that’s bringing them to the breaking point in their relationship. At some point in that first conversation, I ask about their experience with individual therapy because most people who come to couples work are also seeing someone on their own.
More and more often, they tell me they're with a therapist they found online through one of the big platforms. And when I press a little further about how it's actually going, I hear the same things.
They've never met their therapist in person, even though in-person is what they originally went looking for. The work feels driven by questionnaires, they get the same depression survey, every couple of weeks that they answer alone on their phone. They're not sure who sees their answers, or what else gets done with them. And they're not sure what they're really paying, because the bills don't look like the price in the ad.
These are people in crisis, doing individual work that is supposed to be helping hold them up while their marriage is on the line.
I'm a therapist in Rancho Cucamonga, and I hear versions of this story on calls like these all the time: people who did the reasonable thing, chose the affordable option, and only later realized what they'd actually signed up for.
They were hurting, and they reached for the door that opened fastest. The problem isn't them. The problem is that they don’t know what they don’t know.
Consent isn't paperwork. It's the first thing therapy teaches you.
Here's something most people don't know about how therapy is supposed to begin: slowly.
In a first session with me, before we go anywhere near the hard stuff, we talk about what therapy is and isn't. What's confidential and what the limits of that confidentiality are. What it costs. What happens to your information. You get to ask questions, and you get to say no.
That conversation isn't a formality before the real work. In a lot of ways, it is the real work, starting early: your inner life belongs to you, it gets shared on your terms, and trust gets built before anything is asked of you.
The platform model runs that sequence in reverse. The most sensitive information comes first — before consent, before a relationship, before anyone has earned anything.
What one careful look under the hood found
Don't take my word for it. A therapist-education company called ZynnyMe recently went through a major platform's intake the way a client would. They requested in-person therapy and wanted to use a common insurance. They recorded every screen. What they found was alarming to me:
A clinical test, treated like a signup step. After saying they felt anxious and depressed, they were handed a PHQ-9, the standard depression screening questionnaire, and it was scored on the spot. No informed consent had been signed, and no account existed yet. They hadn’t chosen a therapist or even been shown names or faces of possible matches. But once that account exists, that score lives in a healthcare record. It’s a number generated by a website, attached to a person it has never met.
The intake reassured them that their answers stayed between them and the provider they booked. The privacy policy — reachable through one checkbox, alongside everything else — describes categories like biometrics, geolocation, browsing and search history, and demographic information as available for marketing use, and audio as usable not just to deliver services but to develop new products. The terms, meanwhile, can change without notice. Both documents can't be the truth at the same time.
When it came to pricing, the site said, “typically between $0 to $30 a session (once the deductible is met, per the small print). Deductibles commonly run $5,000 to $10,000 depending on your health plan, so that advertised price can be months of full-fee sessions away.
Having clearly requested in-person therapy, they were routed to virtual providers and had to hunt through settings to find the two or three local in-person therapists actually available — out of the nearly two hundred advertised at the start.
What worries me most isn't any single item on that list
It's what this does to a person's relationship with therapy itself.
People arrive at my door pre-scored and pre-labeled, half convinced therapy means filling out forms and being routed somewhere. Or worse, they've seen a number on a screen — moderately severe — with no one sitting across from them to help them process what that number stirred up. A score without a relationship isn't information, it’s anxiety provoking.
And once you've had that experience, it's understandable to conclude that therapy itself is the problem, rather than the way you were sold it.
Four questions worth asking before you start anywhere
You don't need to read a single privacy policy cover to cover. You need a therapist or a platform that can answer these plainly:
Who am I actually building a relationship with — a specific person, or a company that assigns me one?
What happens to everything I type before we ever meet? Who can see it, and what else are they allowed to do with it?
What will this really cost me — with my deductible, not the advertised one?
If something feels wrong, is there a human being who knows my name that I can call?
If the answers come easily, you're probably in decent hands, wherever you landed. If the answers are buried, that's an answer too.
Therapy has a cost problem. But the answer to expensive therapy shouldn't be therapy that treats your most vulnerable information as raw material before anyone has looked you in the eye.
If you're searching for a therapist in Rancho Cucamonga or anywhere in the Inland Empire, that's the standard to hold us to — me included. Ask the questions. A good therapist won't be threatened by them.
Alicia Taverner, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist who helps couples heal after infidelity, years of resentment, and the exhaustion of feeling stuck in the same painful patterns.
Her work helps partners begin to understand each other again, rebuild appreciation, and create lasting change with a focused, supportive approach. Alicia uses brain based techniques, including Brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy, in an intensive format that gives couples more room to heal without the start and stop of weekly sessions.
Learn more about Alicia’s work with affair recovery intensives, relationship therapy, and ketamine therapy, or visit her About page.
