I've been a high school dean, worked with homeless youth, and have worked with elementary students with 504s and IEPs; which means I spent a long time with kids in the place where their struggles actually show up. I saw a lot of kids called defiant, dramatic, or "bad" who were really just misunderstood and lacking proper support. I look at patterns and behaviors as symptoms of something deeper. A child's behavior almost always makes sense once you can see what's happening around them; which is why I take a deeply collaborative approach with parents, schools, and practitioners when necessary. Working with children means I see where things start. So I see adults, too. Often, we're looking at the same thing from the other end: what got pushed down, what never got said out loud, or was said and nobody caught it. That doesn't disappear because time passed. It gets quieter and finds other ways to show up. If your child is struggling, or something in your own life keeps repeating and you can't quite put your finger on it, reach out. I received my Master's in Clinical Mental Health Counseling with a specialization in children and adolescents from Northwestern University. My clinical and parenting insights have been featured in New York Magazine, Newsweek, and Upworthy. I am an out-of-network provider, which means I don't bill insurance companies directly under standard in-network contracts. However, I deliberately designed my practice to make using your out-of-network insurance benefits as easy as possible. If you have a PPO plan, your insurance company likely covers a portion of our sessions. To save you the headache of dealing with insurance paperwork, my billing system automatically files your claims electronically right after our sessions end. You won't have to deal with downloading superbills or chasing down forms. Depending on how your specific policy is set up, you may even qualify to only pay your estimated co-insurance out-of-pocket at the time of our session, rather than waiting weeks for a reimbursement check in the mail. If you'd like, I can run a quick, complimentary insurance check before we book anything. It will tell us exactly what your out-of-network deductible is and give you a clear picture of what your actual out-of-pocket cost will look like. *In compliance with advanced clinical training requirements, I work with board-approved supervisor Krystal Speier, LCPC.