Take Heart Counseling & Equine Assisted Therapy
By Meagan Good, MA, LPC, NPT-C, NLC-P, EP
Founder & Counselor, Take Heart Counseling & Equine Assisted Therapy — Wernersville, PA
You found a practice that feels right. Maybe it was the way they talked about healing, or the sense that here, finally, your child — or your marriage, or you — might be met as a whole person and not a case file. And then you saw two words that gave you pause: private pay.
If that’s where you are right now, we understand the hesitation. Deciding to invest in counseling is already a tender, weighty thing. Adding a question about cost on top of it can feel like one more reason to wait. So let’s talk about it honestly — not to convince you of anything, but so you can make this decision with clear eyes and an open heart.
Private pay means you pay your therapist directly for care instead of having sessions billed through insurance. The practice doesn’t file insurance claims, so there’s no required diagnosis on your record and no insurer deciding how many sessions you receive. You and your therapist set the course of care together
That’s the mechanics of it. But why a practice like ours chooses this model, and what it makes possible for you is where the real story is.
The main benefits of private pay are privacy, control, and access. Your care isn’t tied to a mental health diagnosis on your permanent record, you and your therapist decide the length and course of care rather than an insurance company, and you can access specialized approaches – like equine-assisted therapy – that insurance won’t cover.
When care isn’t routed through an insurance company, a few things change, and they change in your favor.
Your privacy is protected. Insurance requires a formal mental health diagnosis in order to pay for care — and that diagnosis becomes part of your permanent medical record, seen by people who don’t know you, your history, or the fuller story behind why you came. For many of the individuals and families we work with, private pay isn’t about hiding anything. It’s about dignity — about your story staying in the hands of the people who are actually walking with you through it, rather than becoming a line item in a file. Private pay means the story of your healing stays yours.
Your care is decided by you and your therapist — not a claims adjuster. Insurance companies often dictate how many sessions you’re allowed, how long they last, and when your care should end, based on what they’ll reimburse rather than what actually helps. Here, the depth and pace of your healing is a conversation between you and the person walking alongside you.
You have access to care insurance won’t cover. This is a big one, and it deserves its own moment.
Insurance rarely covers equine-assisted therapy. Most insurers have no billing category for it – a session may be filed under a standard psychotherapy code, but that code doesn’t account for the horses, the property, or the specialized equine and clinical training involved. For that reason, equine-assisted therapy is most often offered on a private-pay basis.
Some of the most profound healing we witness doesn’t happen in a chair across from a therapist. It happens in the presence of a horse.
Equine-assisted therapy is a specialized modality — it draws on the extraordinary sensitivity of horses to human emotion to reach places that talk therapy alone sometimes can’t. For a trauma survivor who has learned to armor their words, for a child who can’t yet name what they feel, a horse can open a door that had stayed closed for years.
Insurance has no real category for this. Technically, a session like this might be billed under a standard psychotherapy code (90837) – but that code was built to describe an hour of conversation in an office. It captures none of what’s actually happening: the acres of land, the horses themselves, the years of clinical and equine expertise, the way healing moves through the body and not just the mind. The system has one generic box, and this simply doesn’t fit inside it. Private pay is what makes offering this kind of care possible at all.
This is not a case against talking. Talk-based therapy is genuinely valuable, and for many people it is an essential part of the work. It simply means that for trauma held in the body, talking often needs a companion – something that helps the nervous system itself relearn what safety feels like.
Faith-integrated counseling weaves a client’s faith into evidence-based therapeutic care when the client wants it. At Take Heart, it’s always offered by invitation and never imposed – you can include it as much or as little as you like, and your care is fully whole either way.
For those who want it, we offer counseling that integrates faith into the work of healing. This is never imposed and never assumed – if it’s not what you’re looking for, your care is no less whole without it. But if hope and healing are, for you, rooted in something deeper, you don’t have to leave that part of yourself at the door. It’s welcome here, whenever and however you invite it.
Some private-pay clients can seek partial reimbursement through out-of-network benefits by submitting a superbill to their insurer. Coverage varies widely by plan, and high deductibles often make reimbursement difficult to reach within a year. It’s worth checking your specific benefits, but reimbursement isn’t something to count on.
If you’re curious about what out-of-network benefits you might have, we’re happy to help you look into it — we work with Thrizer, a platform that streamlines the reimbursement process, and we can provide superbills for you to submit to your insurer.
We’ll be honest with you, though: out-of-network mental health coverage varies widely from plan to plan, and many plans carry high deductibles that can make reimbursement difficult to reach within a year of care. The option is there if you’d like to explore it – we’d simply encourage you to look into your specific benefits so you have a clear picture as you decide.
Private-pay therapy costs more upfront than using insurance, but it buys things insurance often limits: longer sessions, care that isn’t capped by a claims adjuster, privacy from a diagnosis on your record, and access to specialized approaches like equine-assisted therapy. Whether that’s worth it depends on what depth of care matters to you.
We won’t pretend private-pay care is cheap. It’s a real investment – in yourself, in your child, in your marriage, in the people you love.
When you weigh the cost, you’re really weighing what unhurried, focused, deeply human care is worth to you and your family — the time it actually takes to do this work well, and the depth that makes healing possible. And underneath the question of “can I afford this?” is usually a bigger one: is hope and healing worth investing in – for me, for the people I love?
That’s a question only you can answer. But if something in you is leaning toward yes, we’d love to talk with you about what care here could look like. Reach out anytime, and let’s have that conversation.
