Exploring Life & Business with Abby Usher And Tara Freni-Kenbeek of The Willow Center

Today we’d like to introduce you to Abby Usher And Tara Freni-Kenbeek.

Hi Abby Usher and, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Our story began in 2022 when the two of us began dreaming about opening up our own psychotherapy practice where we could focus on our top 2 priorities: therapist well-being and client care. In that dreaming phase, we sat down and created a list of the values and intentions that we wanted to guide the opening of our practice. We knew we wanted to prioritize relationships, have our practice rooted in trust, lead with integrity, and model authenticity. We hold one another and ourselves accountable to filtering our business decisions and clinical choices through these values. Tara offers systems therapy for couples, families, and adult individuals, while Abby’s clinical passions are working with young children and their caregivers. We both offer relationally attuned psychotherapy by balancing warm and empathic care with challenging our clients to grow. Our therapeutic approach benefits from us working very well together as collaborating therapists. One of our favorite things about our professional relationship is when we get the opportunity to support the same family system by each working with one part of that system – Tara may see the couple, while Abby provides play therapy to their child.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The struggles that we faced in building our practice were rooted in working with systems that did not share our values. For example, insurance credentialing, claim submission, and obtaining reimbursement for services provided proved to be the most difficult struggle. While we continued to prioritize client care during months of not getting paid from insurance, it was difficult to practice resiliency in working through this challenge. We quickly learned how to measure our bandwidth for tasks like making phone calls and troubleshooting system issues, and we chose to hire external support to take these steps for us as a way to protect against burnout and building resentment.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about The Willow Center ?
The Willow Center is a relationally-attuned psychotherapy practice that provides mental health treatment rooted in our values of human dignity, connection, curiosity and social justice. Abby’s work is grounded in the knowledge that children grow and develop best within the context of safe and healthy caregiving relationships. Abby is an infant mental health therapist and works from an attachment lens. This includes supporting young children in expressing themselves through child-centered play therapy while simultaneously helping parents to understand and be responsive to their children’s needs. Many parents want to offer their child a different experience of their own childhood, and therapeutic support can be so instrumental in disrupting the transmission of generational trauma. Tara’s education and training as a marriage and family therapist highlighted the importance of understanding the influence of systems and context. Tara provides mental health care to folks with intersectionality in mind, believes in celebrating our LGBTQIA+ communities, and operates from a social justice lens.

One of the things that sets us apart from other mental health practices is our sense of community. Every person that walks through our doors becomes a member of The Willow Center community. Interactions occurring in our lobby include conversations between different generations, kiddos sharing their creative projects with others, and parents empathically supporting other parents. These relationships being formed are so special to observe and be a part of. We also prioritize supporting the larger community by boldly displaying our values and participating in events that align with our hopes for the world.

What are your plans for the future?
The two of us are working on growing our own families, and then we are looking forward to some growth for our practice! Ideally, we would love to hire a few limited licensed clinicians to support and guide the development of their professional skills and identities through our relational lens. When we make those hires, we will prioritize our values and hope to support the greater needs of communities by fostering professional growth for therapists whose opportunities may not be equitable to others in our field.

Pricing:

• $150/session private pay rate
• We each reserve a certain number of spots on our caseload for clients who have barriers to receiving quality mental health care and offer a sliding scale fee to expand access to care.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thewillowcenter.clientsecure.me/