Adolescents & Emerging Adults · Identity · Anxiety · Transitions · Family Patterns
Therapy for Adolescents & Emerging Adults
In-person in Coconut Grove · Telehealth throughout Florida
Between Who You Were and Who You Are Becoming
Adolescence and early adulthood are among the most psychologically complex passages a person navigates. Not because something has gone wrong, but because so much is happening at once and so much of it is invisible to the people around you.
There may be a feeling of being out of step: with your family, with your peers, with the version of yourself that others seem to expect. A sense of carrying more than you can easily put into words. Questions about who you are, what you actually want, and whether the life being laid out for you is genuinely yours. Anxiety that has no single clear cause. A way of moving through the world that feels effortful in ways others don’t seem to notice.
These experiences are not signs of failure. They are signs that something real is being worked through.
This is the essential task of this period of life: not simply to achieve or adapt, but to begin to locate oneself, to find out what is genuinely yours, and to develop the inner ground to stand on.
“Identity, like a river, is always changing, always in transition. Like the river downstream, you’re not the same person you were upstream. You begin to define yourself in terms of who you are becoming, not who you have been.“
— Gloria E. Anzaldua
When Development Asks More Than It Appears
The transition from adolescence into adulthood, what developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett called “emerging adulthood”, is not simply a waiting period before real life begins. It is one of the most significant psychological reorganizations a person undergoes: a renegotiation of identity, attachment, and meaning that can feel disorienting even for those who appear to be managing it well.
For adolescents, the stakes are high and often poorly understood by the adults around them. Academic pressure, social comparison, identity questions related to gender, sexuality, culture, or neurodivergence, family conflict, and the particular weight of not yet knowing who you are; these are not small things, and they deserve the same serious attention we give to adult suffering.
For emerging adults, typically in their late teens through mid-twenties, the challenge often shifts: the external structures fall away, and internal ones may not yet be solid. The question “who am I?” becomes unavoidable. Therapy at this stage can help you develop a relationship with yourself that will shape everything that follows.
You May Recognize Yourself, or Your Child, in Some of These:
- Persistent anxiety, low mood, or irritability that doesn’t have an obvious explanation
- Difficulty knowing what you actually feel, want, or believe — separate from others’ expectations
- Identity questions related to gender, sexuality, culture, family, or future direction
- Academic pressure, perfectionism, or a drive to achieve that coexists with a sense of emptiness
- Social difficulty — feeling out of place, unseen, or performing a version of yourself that isn’t quite real
- Family dynamics that are complicated, conflicted, or hard to name
- A history of adverse experiences — loss, instability, relational difficulty — that hasn’t been fully processed
- Neurodivergence (ADHD, autism, or other) that shapes experience in ways that haven’t been adequately understood
- A sense of being on the threshold of adulthood without a clear sense of yourself to bring across it
My Approach to Working with Adolescents & Emerging Adults
I work from a depth-oriented, relational framework, the same foundation that guides my work with adults. This means I bring genuine curiosity to who you are, not simply to the presenting problem. I am not interested in fitting young people into categories or moving quickly toward symptom reduction. I am interested in understanding what is actually happening for you, beneath the surface.
My training includes advanced psychoanalytic work at the Florida Psychoanalytic Institute and three years of post-graduate BodyDreaming Training — integrating Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal Theory, attachment theory, Jungian, and Feminist orientations. I have practiced yoga for over thirty years and taught for twelve, including many years teaching children, tweens, and teenagers. That background shapes how I understand the body in development: as something young people are often simultaneously hyperaware of and disconnected from, and as a source of self-knowledge that rarely gets invited into the room.
With adolescents, I work in a relational, unhurried way that respects the particular privacy and complexity of this developmental moment. I am not an extension of the parental system — I am someone genuinely interested in the young person in front of me. With emerging adults, I offer a space to explore questions of identity, direction, and inner life without the pressure to arrive at answers quickly.
Relational Presence
The therapeutic relationship is not incidental to this work. For young people who may not yet trust adults, being genuinely seen and not managed is itself therapeutic.
Identity & Self-Development
Questions of who you are — including gender, sexuality, culture, values, and direction — deserve a space that holds complexity without rushing toward resolution.
Depth-Oriented & Unhurried
I work psychodynamically, attending to underlying patterns, relational history, and unconscious dynamics — not only to the immediate presenting concern.
Mind-Body Attunement
Adolescents and emerging adults are often highly embodied in their suffering and disconnected from their bodies at the same time. I attend to both dimensions.
What This Work Might Include
Every person’s process is shaped by their particular history, nervous system, and readiness. That said, therapy with adolescents and emerging adults often deepens across several dimensions.
Developing a relationship with your own inner world
For many young people, the interior life has received little attention or has felt unsafe to express. Therapy creates a space to become curious about your own experience: what you actually feel, what you actually think, and where those feelings and thoughts come from.
Understanding the family system
We are all shaped by the families we grew up in, by what was said and what was not, by what was modeled, expected, or withheld. Part of this work involves beginning to see those patterns clearly: not to assign blame, but to develop the understanding that creates freedom.
Identity and self-definition
Questions of gender, sexuality, culture, faith, values, and direction are not distractions from therapy, they are often its heart. I approach these questions with genuine openness and no agenda about where they should lead.
Anxiety, emotional regulation, and the nervous system
Anxiety in adolescence and early adulthood is often not a disorder to be corrected but a signal worth understanding. We attend to the nervous system directly, to what is held in the body alongside what is happening in the mind.
Academic pressure and the drive to achieve
High-achieving young people often experience the particular suffering of excelling externally while feeling internally empty, disconnected, or fraudulent. This tension is worth taking seriously, not explaining away.
Relational patterns and attachment
Friendships, romantic relationships, and family dynamics take on extraordinary psychological weight in these years. We can explore the patterns you bring to relationships, and where those patterns come from.
Preparing for adulthood
The passage into adulthood is not simply logistical. It asks for a psychological reorganization: a capacity to hold yourself, to navigate complexity, and to live from something genuinely your own. Therapy at this stage can help build that internal ground.
Intergenerational patterns and family inheritance
Much of what young people carry belongs not only to them. The anxieties, silences, losses, and relational patterns of previous generations can be transmitted before a child has language for them; in nervous system patterns, in unspoken rules, in the emotional atmosphere of the family. Part of this work involves beginning to discern what is genuinely yours and what was handed to you, and what, if anything, you want to do with what you’ve inherited.
Integration
The goal is not simply to feel better in the short term, though that often happens. The deeper aim is a more genuine relationship with yourself, one that will sustain you through the transitions ahead.
Who Tends to Seek This Work
I work with adolescents (typically ages 15 and up) and emerging adults navigating the particular demands of this developmental period. This includes young people who are struggling visibly, and those who appear to be managing well but are carrying something that deserves more attention than they’ve been able to give it.
Parents sometimes reach out on behalf of a teenager; emerging adults usually contact me directly. In either case, I work to establish a relationship with the young person that is genuinely theirs — private, honest, and not an extension of adult management.
This work may be particularly relevant if you are:
- An adolescent (15+) navigating anxiety, identity questions, family conflict, or a sense of not quite fitting in
- An emerging adult in your late teens or twenties who is in transition; between school and work, between identities, between a past self and one not yet formed
- A young person carrying the weight of high expectations, your own or others’, without an inner life that feels equally tended
- Someone navigating questions of gender, sexuality, culture, or identity who needs a space free of assumptions and agendas
- A neurodivergent young person whose experience has not been adequately understood — in school, in your family, or by yourself
- An adolescent or young adult processing a difficult family history, loss, or formative relational experience
- A parent who is concerned about their teenager and wondering whether depth-oriented therapy, rather than a solution-focused approach, might be the right fit
Available in Miami and Throughout Florida
I offer in-person psychotherapy at my office in Coconut Grove, Miami. I also work with adolescents and emerging adults throughout Florida via secure telehealth — the same relational depth and unhurried presence, in a virtual format.
Sessions are 50 minutes. Longer sessions are available when clinically appropriate. For adolescents under 18, I typically meet briefly with parents at the outset to understand the context — and then the work belongs to the young person.