Teens

Often yes. Reluctance is normal — most teens don't run toward therapy — and the willingness to try can grow once they've met someone. It helps enormously if you frame therapy as support rather than punishment, and if your teen has some say in choosing their therapist. We spend the first session or two building rapport, not diving into hard material. If your teen leaves feeling like the therapist actually got them, they usually come back willingly.

We hold teen sessions confidential except in cases of safety — self-harm, suicidality, abuse, or serious risk. We'll be clear about those limits with both you and your teen up front. For everything else, your teen gets a private space to think out loud, which is essential to real therapeutic work. We'll usually invite family sessions or parent check-ins periodically to keep you in the loop on themes and progress without violating trust.

Teens are in the middle of massive developmental change — brain, body, identity, social world — and their concerns need to be understood in that context. We take their internal world seriously without treating everything as pathology (some of what's hard about being a teenager is just the reality of being a teenager). We're also usually more collaborative and relational than agenda-driven. Rapport with a teenager is not optional.

Yes. Social media, academic pressure, questions of identity (including gender and sexuality), friendship dynamics, and family stress are all part of what teens are actually dealing with. We approach these with respect for your teen and for you as parents, without pushing an agenda. Our job is to help your teen make sense of their world and build the internal resources to navigate it.