THERAPY FOR TEENS AND YOUNG ADULTS
Ages 14 and up
If you’re the one who’s struggling
Adults keep telling you it’s a phase, or that you have nothing to be stressed about, or that you’d feel better if you got off your phone. Meanwhile something is actually wrong and you can’t quite explain it in a way that gets taken seriously.
This is not a place where you get advice you didn’t ask for. It’s a place to work out what is actually going on, with someone whose job is to understand it rather than fix you.
What we talk about stays between us. There are a few limits — if someone is in danger, I have to act — and I will go through those with you in the first session so you know exactly where you stand before you tell me anything.
Common reasons people your age come:
- Anxiety, school pressure, and the feeling of never being enough
- Belonging between two cultures, or between your family’s world and everyone else’s
- Relationships, friendships, and self-worth
- Conversations with parents that go wrong every time
- Feeling too much, or nothing at all, without an obvious reason
If you’re the parent
You have probably tried talking, giving space, setting limits, and none of it has landed. Or your child is functioning fine on paper and you can tell something is off.
Two things worth knowing before you book.
On consent. In Ontario, a young person capable of understanding the decision consents to their own treatment. In practice, this means your child needs to agree to come. A teenager delivered to my office against their will rarely engages, and it is usually worth a conversation at home first.
On confidentiality. If your child consents to their own treatment, what they tell me is confidential — including from you. I know this is uncomfortable when you are the one paying and the one worrying. But it is the reason therapy works with this age group: without it, they manage the conversation instead of using it.
What I will tell you: whether we are working, whether anything requires your involvement, and anything that concerns safety. What I won’t do is report back on the content of sessions.
Where the difficulty is between you and your child rather than inside your child, family sessions are often the more effective route.
How I Work
I don’t work by protocol or worksheets. I work with what is actually holding the difficulty in place — which at this age is often a genuine bind rather than a distortion: real pressure, real conflicting loyalties, real uncertainty about a future no one can promise them.
The aim is not compliance or a better mood on demand. It is for the person in front of me to understand their own situation clearly enough to move in it.
Sessions
Sessions in English, Ukrainian, and Russian. For families where parents and children are fluent in different languages, sessions can move between them — this matters more than it sounds, and it is often where the misunderstanding lives.