Brief therapy with adults, teens, couples and families

Our work together is a collaboration, helping you bolster your internal resources and gain clarity about why you've made the choices you have. With the goal of bringing more of your genuine self into your relationships, that may include identifying experiences that have led to emotional pain or destructive behavior, then learning new ways of understanding those times. Shifting perspective may open the door to changing how you feel and how you respond.  There are no guarantees of specific outcomes in therapy, but it creates an opportunity to care for yourself and those you love, to bring you closer to your best version of yourself and to create more satisfying, meaningful relationships.

Co-parent counseling

Whether you’ve divorced or were never married, whether you’re in the middle of separating or have been apart for years, being parents together with someone you don’t live with or maybe don’t want a relationship with can be hard on both kids and parents. Co-parenting counseling is intended to help you make the difficult, delicate shift from relating as a couple to functioning as “co-parents”. If you’re locked in anger or frustration with a former partner as you disagree over parenting, then the separation you’d planned is unlikely to bring you the relief from tension that you were hoping for.  

Co-parent counseling is not focused on repairing your couple relationship or re-hashing old arguments. I can help you protect your children from being exposed to hostility or conflict, enable them to continue their healthy development even though their parents live apart, and create a functional method of sharing parenting rights and responsibilities so that holidays, finances, graduation events and weddings don’t have to carry unnecessary emotional baggage for years to come.

Parent planning  

For parents using mediation or a Collaborative Divorce process to formalize their separation, I frequently participate on behalf of the parenting decisions needed for the children.  I bring decades of background in child development, the effects of divorce on children, assessing parenting strengths and serving as a court-appointed expert in developing parenting plans to suit the unique needs of individual families.  My suggestions incorporate best practices for shared parenting and research evidence of short and long-term outcomes for children with different parent strengths and weaknesses. We work as a team: you remain the experts on your children, while I provide you the data of what tends to work best with kids' unique temperaments, needs and under various circumstances.  The parenting plan that results serves children by having the benefit of both perspectives, and is more likely to be a sustainable plan that remains relevant for years to come.

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