THE IDEA

A burl is a tree's way of growing around damage, disease, and trauma. When the tree is damaged, a burl–which often looks like a strange ball–begins to grow, covering the hurt in unexpected ways. The concentric rings we all associate with healthy tree growth become random and unmanaged, which can distort the tree’s development. But oddly enough, the swirling and textured rings inside burls are highly prized by woodworkers for their unique beauty. In a similar way, painful experiences like trauma, mental health struggles, and substance use can impact our growth. But as we find ways of managing and working around these challenges, we may be able to transform our hurt into something valuable.

With these experiences in mind, we are bringing forward a model of that combines traditional mental health, addiction, and trauma therapies with intentional physical space interventions. What components of this model may be useful to you will be a specific goal of any initial assessment and can be fluidly changed at any time. For some, this might be closer to traditional psychotherapy, and for others it might be intensive space work in your home with therapy support, and everything in between. You can see more details about all of these options and more in the Services section.

WHO

The individuals and companies under the umbrella of Burl Ring are continually reviewed, trained, and hand-picked because they have different perspectives, expertise, opinions, identities, and values. This is in recognition that attending to diversity allows us to best match your needs, and if we do not have that best match, we are happy to assist however we can in finding that for you somewhere else.

HOW

Organizationally Burl Ring is a cost-share model with a no excess profit mission. What this means is that we have no investors, owners, or executives pursuing extraneous income from your sessions, and every provider and contractor we partner with keeps any income after equitably sharing the overhead of the company. This is a direct challenge to how most therapeutic services are delivered today at for-profit private practices. Even at non-profit centers there are executives and others that have massive salaries and profit greatly from the hard work that the rank-and-file providers and their clients put into therapy. We patently reject this profit and growth stance as incongruent with the spirit of therapy and helping professions writ large. We hope that your experiences feel different because of this stance, we know ours do.

To this end Burl Ring will be pursuing Benefit Corporation Certification to have a third party help hold all of us accountable to these ideals, and we are also examining other ways to maximize transparency such as wage and costs disclosures for our members. Burl Ring also takes the stance that your personal data is sacred, and we will do our utmost to avoid interacting with extractive systems such as for-profit insurances, technology such as AI, or other for-profit entities, as these practices have become exceedingly common and exploitative in the mental health service community.

We commit to always protecting access to care through these endeavors, simplifying systems, offering slide-fee and pro bono services, and not engaging with the pursuit of unearned income for owners or stakeholders, all so that overhead remains low and we can help as many people as we can.