Ready to feel better?

Therapy for parents:

  • It’s as it sounds— individual mental health support for you, the parent/caregiver who does it all! Our time is just for you. It’s meant to explore your life, your challenges, your feelings, and help you feel the way you’re wanting to. This is for you benefit (duh), but also to help you show up the way you want to for your family!

    I am a firm believer that cycles of anxiety and trauma have some of the greatest impacts on our wellbeing.

    Your mom’s “quirks” that now make you cringe and you desperately don’t want to pass onto your kids are part of you. Your parents’ difficulty in tolerating emotions might make it hard for you to actually feel your own feelings, or even worse, be present with your toddler’s tantrum without losing it yourself.

    Our own experiences of anxiety and chronic stress, despite our best efforts, becomes part of our kids’ lives. It’s a hard reality (and a totally normal part of being human), but therapy can increase our awareness and help us slowly change what needs changing.

    Cycle breakers unite!

    • Balancing all of the parts of your life (work, stress, kids, family, school + + +)

    • A big life change like divorce/separation, becoming a parent, infertility, empty nest, challenges with your kids, a new job, etc.

    • Feeling anxious, worried, struggling to focus or find happiness in day to day life

    • Putting a lot of pressure on yourself to succeed or be “perfect”

    • Tough memories from your life that you feel like are impacting your ability to be present

  • You can expect therapy to include various types of work meant to fit your needs. This might include:

    • Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)*

    • Somatic (body-based) therapies and Mindfulness

    • Cognitive Behavioral Therapies (CBT) including Exposure Response Prevention (ERP)

    • Internal Family Systems (IFS)

    • Attachment-based therapy and relational therapies

    You will receive therapy that works best for you, and is directed by your feedback, interests, and current concerns (aka you’re in control!)

    • We’ll spend lots of time talking, but we might also do breathwork/mindfulness techniques, body awareness exercises, or grounding practices.

    • Higher energy- When it’s needed, we laugh! We make silly jokes! We work with your entire self, not just the tough parts.

    • You’re in control- you get to decide if and what you choose to share, the pace you share, and what goals we work towards. Think of it like I’m a passenger with you, along for the ride.

    • If we are working with EMDR, you can learn more about it here; but you’ll be doing eye movements and/or body tapping throughout session to support your processing and healing.

Therapy for kids:

  • Honesty, deciding if someone could benefit from therapy is a very personal and nuanced decision! This why I spend time getting to know you and your child, assessing their symptoms, challenges, and strengths before I make a recommendation of if my services could help your child.

    Common symptoms I see and treat in my practice with kids includes:

    • Difficulty making friends or general decrease in interest in things that they used to love

    • Increase in tantrums, anger, sadness, or emotional outbursts

    • Kids doing (or asking you to do) repeated behaviors that seem connected to anxiety (like asking you questions over and over again, touching/tapping, refusing to do things, rigid routines around bedtime, mealtimes, etc.)

    • Difficulty separating from caregiver/increased clinginess OR child being more disconnected than normal

    • Increased report of physical pain including stomach aches, headaches, etc.

    • Nightmares, sleep changes, interrupted sleep

    • Our first appointment provides time for me to meet with you and your child, both separately and together, to explore symptoms and see how therapy may help.

    • We come up with a plan of what therapy will look like in terms of type, frequency, goals, how much parents/caregivers will be involved in the child’s therapy, etc.

    • Occasionally, some therapy with kids is best done through just working with parents (using SPACE or Parent Coaching). If this is evident, we will speak about what that will look like for your family!

  • Therapy with kids is fundamentally different than therapy with adults because kids have different needs, skills, and strengths than adults do!

    As you might expect, we use play, activities, art, games, movement, and more to do the same thing that just talk therapy might achieve for adults. Parents can expect their kids to be moving, laughing, yelling, crying, and everything in between during their sessions. My office is a space for all feelings and is made for each child who comes here.

    With anxiety and trauma therapy for children, it’s common that I am asking them to talk and think about scary and stressful things, which is hard! I find ways to make this approachable to your child, avoiding any form of retraumatization, and also support them in meeting their goals.

    At our first sessions, we will talk more about how we do this in a way that is specifically tailored to your child and their needs.

  • I incorporate parent coaching into many of my 1:1 therapy work with kids. No matter what brings your child into my office, we will also have time regularly to connect and work on any specific caregiver goals we may have. We might practice how to establish clearer expectations for bedtimes, building in more 1:1 time for you and your child to build your relationship, how to not build your child’s anxious thinking up accidentally, how to respond in a tantrum, and so much more.

    I teach evidence-based parenting strategies supported by my training in CBT for Behavior taught by University of Washington’s Harborview Trauma Center and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy. I am trained in SPACE protocol, which supports parents in managing their child’s anxiety symptoms without their children needing to attend therapy.

Hannah is trained in evidence-based therapies meant to help reduce issues from anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and trauma. These include:

EMDR Therapy

Exposure Response Prevention (ERP)

Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE)

Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TFCBT)

Hannah’s current practice focuses on: school-aged children (ages 7-12) with emerging Obsessive Compulsive symptoms, kids experiencing anxiety with a history of trauma/family stressors, kids navigating the intersection of anxiety and neurodivergence, and in working with anxious parenting adults who are working to balance all the roles in their lives