Every Age, and thePeople Around Them

No two people are the same. That is not a nice sentiment to put on a website, it is the working assumption behind everything here. Therapy for families, those who experience Trauma or those who experience Autism doesn't look the same. So what changes between a four year old and a seventy year old is not my regard for them. It is the door I come in through.

With children, and I see children as young as four, the work happens on the floor and through play. A child does not sit across from an adult and describe their internal state, and asking them to is a good way to learn nothing. They show you instead, in a game, in a drawing, in what they do with the blanket. Parents are part of that work, because a child's world is mostly built by the adults in it.

With teens, the thing that matters most is that the room is actually theirs. A teenager who suspects you are a delivery system for their parents' agenda will give you an hour of nothing, and they will be right to. So I am straight with them about what I keep and what I do not, and I work with teens and parents collaboratively rather than as a messenger between them.

Young adults are often carrying two things at once: the ordinary weight of building a life, and a delayed reckoning with what happened earlier. This is also where a lot of people first realize they are autistic or have ADHD, after years of assuming they were simply failing at things other people found easy.

With adults, we usually start with the presenting thing, the anxiety or the grief or the marriage, and end up somewhere older than that. Adults are also the people most likely to arrive already fluent in their own symptoms and least likely to have been asked what they want their life to feel like.

Seniors bring loss, and change of role, and bodies that no longer do what they did, and frequently the assumption that it is too late to bother. It is not. Couples and families bring a system rather than a person, and the work is different again: less about who is right and more about what keeps happening between you and how it might stop.

Families and caregivers sit slightly outside these categories and are often the people carrying the most. Parents come without their child in the room. Foster and kinship caregivers come because nobody has asked how they are doing in a long time. Adults come to talk about a parent, or a sibling, or a household they are holding together on their own. You do not need the person you are worried about to agree to therapy before you can have some.

Across all of it the method is the same. I will meet you where you're at. Modalities are chosen with you rather than applied from a manual, and I don't get to choose what works. You do.