Therapy
Neurodivergent Therapy
Personalized therapy that starts with understanding you.
Now is the time to thrive
Whether you are looking for support for yourself, your child, or your teen, finding the right therapist can make a meaningful difference.
At TheraThrive, we believe effective therapy begins with understanding the whole person, not just symptoms that need to change. We take the time to understand your experiences, strengths, challenges, relationships, environment, and also the many factors that may be contributing to what is happening now.
Our therapists work with children, teens, adults, and families, with particular expertise in neurodivergent therapy and supporting people whose experiences may not fit neatly within traditional approaches to therapy.
Therapy Should Fit You
There is no single way that therapy should look.
You may think best while fidgeting or doing something with your hands. Your child may communicate more freely through play, creativity, or a favorite interest than through direct questions. Your teen may need time to develop trust before they are ready to talk about what is difficult. You may have spent years learning strategies that sounded good in theory yet never quite worked for the way your brain actually works.
We don't expect you (or your child) to fit yourself into a predetermined model of therapy. Instead, we work to understand what helps you feel accepted, comfortable, engaged, and understood, and then adapt therapy accordingly.
For neurodivergent clients in particular, this may mean paying attention to sensory needs, communication differences, executive functioning, autonomy, special interests, energy, masking, filtering, and also the demands a person might be managing outside of the therapy room.
We adapt therapy to the person, not the person to therapy.
Sometimes you know something isn't working, even when you don't know exactly why
People come to therapy for many different reasons.
Perhaps your child holds it together all day and falls apart as soon as they get home. Your teen may be overwhelmed by school, friendships, expectations, or simply keeping up with everyday life. Maybe anxiety has begun limiting what you can do, relationships keep falling into familiar patterns, or you find yourself exhausted from managing responsibilities that seem easier for everyone else.
Sometimes the problem is easier to name: anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, trauma, burnout, family conflict, or a major life transition.
Other times, you simply know that life has become harder than it should feel.
You don't need to have everything figured out before beginning therapy. Understanding what is happening can be part of the work we do together.
Understanding before changing
When something is causing difficulty, it is natural to ask, How do we make this stop?
We also want to understand, Why is this happening?
An emotional response or coping strategy that looks confusing from the outside often makes much more sense once we understand what is happening underneath it. We may consider emotional and physical regulation, sensory needs, executive functioning, relationships, past experiences, developmental differences, environmental demands, identity, physical health, and other factors that may be contributing.
For a child who refuses school, for example, simply increasing expectations is unlikely to address the reason school has become difficult. A teen who appears unmotivated may actually be overwhelmed or burned out. An adult who has been told for years to become more organized may need workarounds designed for an ADHD brain rather than another planner.
Understanding the why doesn't mean that nothing needs to change. It helps us identify changes that are more likely to be realistic and sustainable.
Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapy for Children, Teens & Adults
Being neurodiversity-affirming means more to us than using affirming language.
If you or your child is autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, PDA, gifted or twice-exceptional, has learning differences, or otherwise experiences the world differently, our goal is not to teach you to look more neurotypical.
Therapy may instead involve developing a better understanding of your own brain and nervous system, recognizing needs before reaching a point of overwhelm, finding strategies that actually work for you, knowing your strengths well enough to lean on them, communicating and advocating for your needs, navigating relationships, recovering from burnout, or developing a stronger and more compassionate understanding of yourself.
For children and teens, this also means that we help the adults around them to understand what they need and how to communicate effectively with them. Sometimes meaningful change happens not because a child becomes better at tolerating an environment that isn't working, but instead because we find ways to make the environment work better for the child.
Therapy Through Different Stages of Life
Child Therapy
Children don't always tell us what is happening through words. Therapy may include play, creativity, movement, games, interests, emotional exploration, and other developmentally appropriate ways of connecting and communicating. We also recognize that helping a child often means helping the adults who care for them understand what their behavior may be communicating and how to support them outside of therapy.
Teen Therapy
Adolescence brings increasing independence alongside academic, social, family, and developmental demands. For neurodivergent teens in particular, those demands can sometimes become overwhelming.
We want therapy to be a place where teens can be understood without feeling that they are constantly being evaluated or corrected. Therapy can provide space to explore identity, relationships, emotions, stress, neurodivergence, and the challenges of becoming increasingly independent while developing practical strategies for the things that are making life difficult.
Adult Therapy
You may come to therapy because of anxiety, depression (including existential depression), relationships, work, parenting, trauma, or a major transition. Or perhaps you are beginning to understand yourself differently after recognizing ADHD, autism, giftedness, or another form of neurodivergence later in life.
Therapy can provide a place to understand longstanding patterns, find acceptance, develop new ways of responding to challenges, strengthen relationships, recover from burnout, and consider what a life that works with your brain.
Parents & Families
When someone in a family is struggling, everyone can feel the effects.
Our work with parents and families focuses on increasing understanding rather than assigning blame. We help families recognize patterns, understand differences in communication and regulation, reduce unproductive conflict, and develop practical ways of responding to one another's needs.
Sometimes changing the question from How do we get them to stop doing this? to What is happening here, and what does this person need? can open the door to very different solutions.
Relationships
Relationships can be deeply rewarding and also quite complicated, particularly when people within the relatinship experience, communicate, or respond to the world differently.
Relationship therapy can help you better understand one another, recognize patterns that lead to disconnection or conflict, communicate more effectively, and find ways of meeting each other's needs without asking either person to become someone they are not.
For neurodivergent couples and relationships, we also consider differences in communication, sensory needs, executive functioning, emotional regulation, expectations, and ways of expressing connection. Our goal in couples counseling isn't to determine whose way is right, yet more to help you understand each other more clearly and build a relationship that works better for both of you.
More than one way to do therapy
Different people need different things from therapy, and you may notice that those needs tend to change over time.
Our therapists draw from a wide range of evidence-based and developmentally appropriate approaches, including relational and insight-oriented therapy, modified cognitive approaches that work with neurodivergent minds, DBT-informed strategies, child centered play therapy, sandtray therapy, expressive therapies, trauma-informed ERP treatment methods, narrative therapy, control mastery, parent work, ACT, and other approaches that we modify as appropriate to each client.
We don't use a particular therapy simply because it is the approach we happen to provide. We consider what you are experiencing, what you want to change, what research informs us could be helpful, and what fits you as a person.
The approach should serve you, and not the other way around.
Therapy doesn't happen in a vacuum
What happens outside of the therapy room matters.
A child's difficulties may be closely connected to what is happening at school. A teen's anxiety may be intertwined with sensory overwhelm, executive functioning, social experiences, or family dynamics. An adult's burnout may not improve simply by learning additional coping skills if the demands of everyday life remain unsustainable.
When helpful and with appropriate permission, our therapists can work collaboratively with parents, schools, physicians, psychiatrists, and other professionals involved in your or your child's care.
Because TheraThrive also provides psychological assessment, neurofeedback, parent support, school consultation, and more intensive services, such as our IOP for neurodiverent teens, we are able to consider different pieces of the picture while still recognizing that not everyone needs every service.
Sometimes therapy is exactly what is needed. Sometimes therapy helps us recognize that something else would be helpful too.
Finding the right therapist matters
Therapy is personal. Training and clinical experience matter, and so does finding someone with whom you or your child feels comfortable enough to be genuine.
Our therapists bring different personalities, backgrounds, specialties, interests, and ways of connecting with clients. We encourage you to learn more about our clinicians and find someone who feels like a good fit for you or your child.
You don't need to know exactly what type of therapy you need before reaching out. If you know that something isn't working, that life has become harder than it needs to be, or that you or your child could use additional support, that is enough of a place to begin.