Individual and Family sessions in person in Sacramento or online anywhere in California
Therapy for teenagers, young adults, and the parents supporting them
People come to therapy at different points.
Some arrive because something specific happened. Others arrive because a low, constant discomfort has been running underneath everything for months and it eventually became something demanding our attention. Both are reasonable places to begin, and neither requires having the right words ready beforehand.
What follows describes the three kinds of work I do most often in my practice. There is overlap between them, and the right starting point is usually clearer after a conversation than it is from reading it on a page.
Therapy for teenagers
School is where most of this shows up first. Assignments stop getting turned in, mornings get harder, or a kid who used to talk stops talking. Some teenagers describe feeling anxious in a way they cannot explain, and some describe the physical version of it before they have any language for the rest, a tight chest or the sense of forgetting to breathe. Others are not sure anything is wrong and are mostly there because a parent is worried.
Any of these situations are workable. I spent more than a decade as a clinician in schools, which means I have sat with a great many teenagers who did not particularly want to talk to anyone, and I do not take that personally or treat it as resistance.
Sessions with teenagers tend to be conversational rather than structured. There is no requirement to talk about anything a person is not ready to discuss, and the first session covers what stays private and what does not, in plain terms, before anyone decides what they want to say. I am not going to give parents a report on what is shared in therapy.
The work usually centers on managing anxiety and heavy emotions, understanding patterns that are difficult to see from the inside, and building tools that hold up on a hard day rather than only in a quiet room.
Therapy for young adults
The years between eighteen and the mid twenties take longer to resolve than they used to, and the expectations attached to them have not adjusted accordingly. Many young adults are managing school or a first job competently while feeling directionless underneath it, and there is often a fair amount of shame attached to that gap.
Some describe anxiety that has quietly narrowed what they say yes to. Plans get canceled, opportunities get skipped, and the world gets smaller by degrees. Others describe going numb after long stretches of feeling too much, and find the numbness harder to live with than the anxiety. There is a lot of comparison with peers along with a feeling of being behind that rarely gets said out loud.
Feeling frozen is common here too, often because a person believes whichever direction they pick will lock them in permanently. Most people have several careers and change their minds more than once. Not knowing what you want is a more ordinary position to be in than knowing.
In sessions, the work tends to involve untangling those patterns, learning to sit with discomfort without organizing an entire life around avoiding it, and getting clearer about what actually matters to a person rather than what they assume they are supposed to want. I help think through decisions and name perspectives that are not currently in view. I will not tell anyone what to do.
Support for parents and families
Many parents arrive having watched something go wrong for months without knowing how to help in a way that does not make it worse. Conversations at home turn into arguments or turn into a closed door. Some parents have said things out of fear that came out as anger, and then spent the night replaying it. It is also common to have stopped mentioning any of this to friends, because the advice stopped being useful and the comparisons became difficult to sit through.
Parents often come in with the impression that the focus will be solely on their child, and that makes sense. In practice the work frequently includes the parent, not because parents are doing something wrong, but because the adults in a family usually have the most capacity to make meaningful change. My view is that parents love their kids and are doing the best they can with what they have available to them.
This work can look like meeting on your own, meeting together with your teenager or young adult, or some combination that shifts over time. It often covers communication that has broken down, figuring out what is reasonable to expect right now, and finding ways to look after yourself when there has been very little left over for a long while.
Start with a call
Twenty minutes on the phone, just to talk. You tell me what is going on and I will tell you honestly whether I think I can help. If I’m not the right fit, I will help you find someone who is.