Building Trust with Your Teen: Tips from a Therapist for Teenagers
Building trust with a teenager is hard work. Hard? For sure. It’s consistent work, too. But the payoff is more than worth it. Trust between a teen and parent goes as far as you can imagine toward a healthy relationship. Trust is vital to pretty much any relationship in general anyway, right? Here is a…
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Setting Boundaries: How Counseling Can Help to Empower Young Adults
What are boundaries? Boundaries keep certain things in and certain things out, right? They are usually clearly marked and have signs around them indicating what they’re there for. There are boundaries for athletic fields, property, roads – boundaries are all around us. But what does it mean for us to set boundaries in our lives?…
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How to Know If Your Teen Needs Counseling: Signs to Watch For in Franklin, TN
Teen Counseling What is teen counseling? Why would you think about your teen getting counseling? Would your teen even want to go to counseling? I hear these questions, along with plenty of others, when I first get calls from parents, or even when friends of mine around Franklin ask me about counseling for their teens…
Read MoreWhat Causes Anxiety in Adolescents?
This is one of the most common questions I hear. When someone hears that I’m a therapist for adolescents, they always want to know what seems to cause anxiety in teens. Sometimes it sounds like “What could a teenager today possibly have to be anxious about?” and sometimes it’s more like “I can’t imagine being…
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Surviving Senioritis: How to Tackle High School Graduation Anxiety
So, you’re a high school senior, or the parent of one, and suddenly everything feels like a confusing mix of “I’m so done with this place” and “Wait, what comes next?” Welcome to the glorious mess known as senioritis. It’s more than just a lack of motivation. Sometimes, it’s anxiety in a cap and gown.…
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A Teen Therapist: Because Sometimes Even Google Can’t Solve Your Problems
Let’s be real: if Google could solve all your problems, none of us would need therapy. You’d just type in “Why am I crying in the school bathroom again?” and boom—a perfectly tailored solution pops up between an ad for acne cream and a TikTok compilation of cats doing backflips. But that’s not how it…
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Therapy-Driven Activities for LGBTQIA+ Teens in Brentwood: Where to Practice Coping Strategies
So, you may have seen the blogs I’ve written in the past about coping skills not always being the answer. While they’re not always the answer, or at least the whole answer, they are a necessary part of making it through life. I can’t count the number of times a parent has contacted me to…
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How Teen Therapy Can Help LGBTQIA+ Teens Manage Anxiety and Build Confidence
How does in-person or online teen therapy help? What do you actually do in therapy? How is talking about my problems going to fix anything? As a teen therapist in Brentwood, TN, I get questions like these very often from people on a day to day basis. Frequently from my clients or people who are…
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Coping Skills: Still Not the Whole Answer
Why write about the wrong way to use coping skills? I get so many phone calls and emails from parents asking me to teach their kids coping skills. In the past few weeks, the misuse of coping skills has come up repeatedly, and it’s inspired me to write about coping skills…and their limitations. I’ve written…
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How Does Online Therapy Work?
When I first heard of online therapy, my first thought was “What? Why? That sounds terrible.” But, here I am 2 years into providing online counseling to teens and young adults in different areas of Tennessee (yes, I started voluntarily, a year before the pandemic started). It can bring up so many questions for people,…
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