Private Online Therapy for Women in Washington, DC

A city that asks what you do before it asks who you are

You’ve had the conversation a thousand times. Someone learns your title and adjusts their posture accordingly. In DC that shorthand works so well that it can go years without anyone asking the other question, and eventually you stop asking it yourself.

The women we work with here are lawyers, federal employees, physicians, policy people, nonprofit leaders, consultants, Hill staff who became Hill veterans. They are competent to a degree that hides a great deal. The pace is normal until something makes it not normal: a body in perimenopause that won’t run on four hours anymore, a marriage that’s gone administrative, a parent’s diagnosis, a promotion that arrived and felt like nothing.

Discretion, in plain terms

This is the part most DC clients ask about first, so we’ll answer it directly.

Haven is private-pay. We do not bill insurance. Nothing about your care is submitted to an insurance company: no diagnosis, no claim in a database, no utilization reviewer reading your file to decide whether you’ve had enough sessions. There is no third party in the room and no record of your therapy sitting inside a claims system.

If you have out-of-network benefits and want reimbursement, we’ll give you a superbill, a detailed receipt you can submit yourself. That choice stays entirely yours, and plenty of our DC clients decide the privacy is worth more than the reimbursement.

Sessions are by video, so there’s no waiting room, no building lobby, no chance of running into someone from your agency or your firm on the way out.

What we actually work on

Perimenopause and the ways it gets waved off as stress. Burnout that rest doesn’t fix. Anxiety and the 3 a.m. version of your own thinking. Relationship strain, including the drift that happens between two people whose jobs are both demanding. Grief. Trauma from earlier in life that midlife tends to bring back up. Career reinvention, including the quiet, disloyal-feeling question of whether you still want the thing you spent twenty years earning.

We are trauma-informed, which is not decoration. It means we pay attention to how the past lives in your present, in your body and your relationships, and we don’t push faster than is safe.

Who you’d be working with

Therapy in DC is provided by Dr. Carla Smith, PhD, LCSW, LMFT, Haven’s founder, licensed in Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia. Practically, that matters more here than almost anywhere. Licensure follows where you are physically sitting, so if you live in the District and take a session from your place in Bethesda, or move across the river to Alexandria next year, your care continues without interruption. That’s not true of most therapists in this region.

Sessions run a full 50 to 55 minutes. Individual and relationship therapy is $175. Group therapy is 60 minutes at $55. Coaching, available in every state, is $175.

Groups

Small groups of six to eight women, led by a licensed therapist, organized around this season of life. For women who spend their days being the most composed person in the room, the relief of a space where composure isn’t the assignment is significant.

Fifteen minutes, no cost, no intake interrogation

Book a free consultation. Tell us what’s been happening. We’ll tell you honestly whether we can help, and if we can’t, we’ll point you toward someone who can.

Haven is not an emergency service. For urgent help, call or text 988.