Our work together is a collaboration, helping you recognize and bolster your internal resources and gain clarity about why you've made the choices you have. Typically, the first few sessions are devoted to me learning more about you and what led to your current situation. That time is an essential component before I can responsibly recommend trying anything different. With the goal of bringing more of your genuine self into your relationships, our work may sometimes include identifying experiences that have led to emotional pain or destructive behavior. While that may be uncomfortable, exploring these experiences together will provide a roadmap for learning new ways to respond to those experiences. Shifting perspective may open the door to changing how you feel and how you respond. Gradually, you may find yourself more and more able to bring those new ways of responding into your present day-to-day interactions with your significant relationships.

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 more narrowly 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 and enable them to keep their healthy development on track even though their parents live apart. Developing strong co-parenting skills creates 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.

For parents using mediation or a Collaborative Divorce process to formalize their separation, I frequently participate on behalf of the children’s best interests, and the parenting decisions needed for the children. As a child psychologist by training, I bring decades of background in child development, the effects of divorce on children, assessment of parenting strengths and serving as a court-appointed expert in developing parenting plans, to help parents develop plans to suit the unique needs of their individual family. My contribution incorporates best practices for shared parenting and research evidence of short and long-term outcomes for children with different parental 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.

Whether you're cooperatively planning for your children’s needs after separating, you don’t speak to one another at all or are contemplating a court-ordered custody evaluation and fearful of someone else defining when you can be with your children, I understand the simultaneous demands of addressing your own needs as well as those of your children, and the importance of a confidential place for support. It’s different from therapy in several ways: meetings can be planned on an “as-needed” basis, and the focus is on immediate decision-making and planning to meet your goals, not on an in-depth assessment of your emotional functioning or development of a treatment plan. Some individuals find it helpful to have both a parenting consultant during divorce and separately, their own on-going therapist. As your consultant, I’m able to offer structure during stressful time and guide you when the stakes are high involving the long-term well-being of your children and meeting your own coping needs going forward. . You may find this helps you feel less overwhelmed, to set priorities for you and your children, avoid pitfalls and develop a course of action to not just cope through these losses, but have more confidence as you move forward.