Individual therapy for teenagers ages 13–17 navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, substance use, relationship difficulties, and the ordinary hard work of growing up.
Therapy with adolescents requires a different framework than therapy with adults. Teenagers are at a developmental stage where autonomy, identity, and trust are central concerns. Research consistently shows that teens engage more honestly and make more progress in therapy when they believe the space is genuinely private. A teenager who suspects that everything they say will be reported back to their parents is a teenager who won’t tell me what’s actually going on.
At the same time, I take seriously that you’re the parent — you have legal rights regarding your child’s care, you’re usually the one seeking and funding treatment, and you have a legitimate interest in your child’s wellbeing. My goal is to honor both realities at once, not sacrifice one for the other.
A significant part of my work with adolescents involves helping them communicate more openly with the important adults in their life — including you. Therapy isn’t a place where your child learns to keep secrets. It’s a place where they learn to understand themselves well enough to eventually share more, not less.
Rather than the standard adult consent, I use a defined confidentiality structure with adolescent clients, which both you and your teen agree to before treatment begins.
Whether your child is attending sessions, a broad non-content-specific sense of whether therapy is progressing, and — without exception — any imminent safety concern or mandated reporting obligation.
What your teen tells me — their thoughts, feelings, experiences, and behavior — stays between us, along with clinical details beyond what’s required for insurance billing.
Your teen signs an assent form acknowledging this structure and that you’ve agreed to it. Watching a parent sign something that protects their privacy is, for a lot of teenagers, one of the more meaningful moments early in the work.
I may schedule periodic check-in conversations with you — at my clinical discretion, or whenever both you and your teen want one. What I won’t do is hold individual parent consultations your child doesn’t know about, because that would cost me the therapeutic relationship I’m trying to build. If something comes up between sessions, reach out to me directly and I’ll use my clinical judgment about how best to address it.
This is a summary. The full confidentiality agreement — including how substance use treatment and legal exceptions are handled — is reviewed and signed by both parent and teen at intake.
The most common reasons teens end up in my office — and ones I take seriously rather than treating as routine. We work to understand the patterns underneath the symptoms and build practical skills for managing them.
I am trained in Prolonged Exposure (PE), one of the most well-researched treatments for trauma and PTSD, adapted as clinically appropriate for adolescent clients.
I spent several years as an addiction counselor within Emory Healthcare’s intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization programs. If substance use becomes part of your teen’s treatment, additional federal confidentiality protections under 42 CFR Part 2 may apply, depending on the circumstances and on Georgia law. Where they do, they can give your teen more control over those particular records than the structure above provides. I’ll tell you if that becomes relevant to your child’s care and walk you through what it means.
Conflict with parents, peer relationships, identity, and the general work of figuring out who they are separate from the people who raised them.
I accept Aetna, UnitedHealthcare, BCBS of Georgia, and Cigna/Evernorth. For self-pay families, fees are set collaboratively — I find that a rate we arrive at together reflects your actual circumstances better than a fixed published number. Your fee will be documented in a Good Faith Estimate as required by federal law.
If cost is a concern, please reach out before assuming it’s a barrier.
The first step is a conversation with you as the parent or guardian — no commitment, no pressure. Reach out by phone, email, or through the contact form on the home page.