If anxiety, fear, or sadness are showing up in your relationships, I want to understand you. Once I understand you, I want us to come to a shared agreement on what keeps anxiety, fear, or sadness showing up day after day. From there, we can endeavor to flip the script on those feelings. This may involve: approaching what is uncomfortable, figuring out your values and getting your behaviors aligned with your values, cultivating present awareness (mindfulness), changing your behaviors, or understanding yourself and others without changing anything at all. Whichever of these scientifically backed approaches we decide make sense for you, I can provide the compassion and encouragement towards the better future that exists for you.  

This is not the part of the website where I convince you I’m cool. This is the part of the website where I share with you that about half the people I work with are teens. This gives me a little advantage over some adults in understanding what life is like for you. The “child” part of being a child psychologist doesn’t mean I’ll talk to you in a soothing or patronizing tone.  I won’t pretend like I have all the answers. What I can offer is a really effective way of decreasing anxiety. It involves facing your fears at the outer limits of your comfort zone. It has to be a team effort to work. If you’re up for it, I would love to listen to you, support you, and challenge in ways that will get you to your goals.

If you are reading this, you may be a child thinking about working with me and wondering about what coming to see me would include more exactly. After getting to know one other, we’d learn all about anxiety – like how common it is and how it shows up in our bodies. Then, we’d work on learning some skills to help you boss back your anxiety when it shows up and gets in the way of life. After you’ve learned some good skills, we would start working together to do the things that anxiety has made difficult. Doing these hard things keeps anxiety from coming back again and again but you’re in control of how fast or slow we do our bravery challenges. How much your parents are involved depends on how anxiety is showing up for you. Perhaps we will ask them to do fun things like reward you for working hard when you come to see me. Perhaps we will ask them to act in a certain way so they can support you bossing back your anxiety. Our goal would be to get you feeling better and on with your life as soon as possible!

It is harder to be an independent adult than it was in decades past. Adult children with learning differences, anxiety, depression, autism, and ADHD may have a particularly challenging path to adulthood. The combination of realities has left many parents providing for their adult children by housing them, funding them, and doing services for them like driving, laundry, and managing appointments. If you are a parent of an adult and believe that their functioning and future could be better than the present one, I can work with you to motivate their independence instead of relying on comfort.   

Teenagers are supposed to have intense (and even fraught!) emotional lives. It’s developmentally normal for teens to push back against authority and crave independence while seemingly lacking the capacity to exercise self-control or good judgement. Some teens (the data would suggest that it’s more accurate to say “many” or “most” teens) are struggling with emotions that are too intense, and are come up short in managing those emotions in effective ways. They are struggling with substances, screens, and sleep. As a parent of a teen, you have less control than you used to have over your child. Nonetheless, I have strategies that can help you survive this period of transition, and move the needle on the parts of their lives that you feel are too much or not enough.

If your child is struggling with behaving at home, it’s both instinctive and unhelpful to blame yourself. Some children come into this world as thrill seekers while others come into this world incredibly cautious. Either set of children may need a specific environments to succeed, and our work will be in equipping you on how to provide that environment. Once I understand your child, what works well for your family, and what hasn’t worked for your family, I will offer you specific parenting skills to consistently implement at home. We may practice implementing these skills in session with your child present. If your child is struggling with behavior problems elsewhere, for example at school in addition to at home, we will work to see how we can create the right environment for success in that context, too.