Princeton Center for DBT and Counseling

Julie has unfortunately changed her ways in the last two years since I first saw her. I originally thought I found a therapist who understood me but I was wrong. She asked me if I was interested in EMDR at my first appointment back, and took up half of the appt time talking about it. I said maybe, at some point. At the following appointment she already had the things set up for an EMDR session. I had no forewarning, she didn't text me or anything to let me know that was the plan so I could be even remotely prepared. There was no treatment planning at all. She just wanted to jump right in. I told her I wasn't feeling up to it and she acted visibly annoyed about it. I texted her a week later to tell her EMDR wasn't right for me at the time and she dropped me as a client. I would have given this place 5 stars in 2024 but I didn't feel welcome this time around. I hadn't been since March of that year and I barely got any time to even discuss the time between going. The owner was made aware of this and did apologize for my experience but I did not receive an apology from Julie herself. I've been traumatized a lot in my life and this situation has made it even harder for me to trust people.

Dec 2024: My referring therapist said that she’s heard good reviews of this place, so I’m sure that many people get a good experience out of it. I personally did not, and am not sure what I could’ve done for it to be different. I wrote in a form that a potential trigger for me was if I did a group support type of therapy where people shared potentially traumatic experiences, so I was not interested in that and only specifically skills training. I said I was referred specifically for DBT based training. During my intake I was then triggered because I was explained I’d have to reimagine my traumatic experience in the non-DBT type of therapy she wanted me to do (Edit Oct 2025: called EMDR, which it seems they’re continuing to push to others from another review on here). She also told me there was another patient who was the same race as me at the same university and asked me for clubs to recommend to that patient to join (Edit Oct 2025: which seems like a violation of privacy). After follow up conversation she said I should do group skills if I wanted DBT emotional regulation training because that was what group was for and individual therapy wouldn’t offer it in the same way. I was triggered again during group skills because it involved people explaining in detail the current person and situation that was bothering them for a role play project to train for encountering them in real life. There was no emotional regulation training and they said they wouldn’t do anything other than this project for over a month. I have no idea why this happened and I really wished I was able to get the good experience I heard endorsements about. Edit Oct 2025: it seemed that editing this removed their response. They left a generic response about their individual and group practices. They stated individual practices don’t proceed with treatment until the patient consents and that it is expected during group therapy to hear others triggering events. My response is that I was not listened to in my explicit request for individual DBT skills treatment and instead offered EMDR and group, which I didn’t consent to with EMDR and tried group even though I already told them why I was worried and was promised false things. This also doesn’t address the fact they gave me information about another patient just because we were the same race.