Therapy for Parents

in San Francisco and California

Parenting asks more of you than almost anything else in your life. It asks you to show up consistently for another person while managing your own history, your own nervous system, your own needs, and your own fears about whether you're doing it right.

It surfaces things you thought you'd resolved. It strains relationships you thought were solid. It asks you to become someone you've never been before, sometimes overnight. As a California psychologist specializing in the psychological experience of parenting, I work with parents navigating the full arc: from the identity disruption of becoming a parent for the first time, through the relentless years of raising young children, through the particular challenges of parenting teenagers, and into the complex and often underaddressed territory of parenting adult children, through online therapy throughout California.

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Mom and son enjoying their time together

SERVICES

My Approach to Therapy for Parents

My approach is relational and depth-oriented, grounded in attachment theory and the understanding that how we parent is shaped, often invisibly, by how we were parented. The patterns you carry from your own childhood don't disappear when you become a parent. They show up in how you respond to your child's distress, in what your child's behavior activates in you, in the moments when you react in ways you didn't intend and don't fully understand.

I work with parents individually, not to coach them on techniques, but to help them understand what's happening underneath their parenting: what their child is triggering, what history is being activated, what they're trying to give their children that they didn't receive themselves.

I provide online individual therapy for parents throughout California. All sessions happen via secure video (Zoom) from wherever you're most comfortable, including, often, your car.

The goal is not to make you a perfect parent. It's to help you become a more conscious one: aware of your own patterns, able to repair when you get it wrong, and able to give your children something closer to what you wish you'd had.

My focus is on creating lasting change through:

Understanding What Parenting Is Activating in You

We connect your reactions, fears, and blind spots as a parent to the experiences that shaped them, so that your responses to your children are yours rather than inherited.

Breaking Intergenerational Patterns

We work directly on the patterns you absorbed from your own parents: what you're trying to replicate, what you're trying to repair, and what you may be passing on without meaning to.

Supporting You Through the Transitions Parenting Brings

Every stage of parenting requires a version of you that didn't exist before. Therapy supports the identity work that each transition demands, not just the practical management of it.

What Brings Parents to Therapy

Parents come to therapy for a wide range of reasons. Sometimes it's a specific crisis: a child who is struggling, a relationship that has strained under the weight of parenting, a stage of parenting that is harder than expected. Sometimes it's a quieter recognition: that they're reacting in ways they don't like, that they're recreating dynamics from their own childhood, that the person they are as a parent doesn't fully match the parent they wanted to be.

Common reasons parents seek therapy include feeling overwhelmed, depleted, or chronically anxious about their children's wellbeing. Reacting with anger, withdrawal, or anxiety in ways that feel disproportionate or out of character. Recognizing patterns from their own upbringing in how they parent. Struggling with the relationship strain that parenting has brought. Grieving the loss of self, freedom, or identity that parenting has required. Navigating a difficult stage with a child and needing support that isn't advice.

What most of these have in common is that they aren't really about technique. They're about the person doing the parenting, and that's what therapy addresses.

Parenting can make parents feel overwhelmed, depleted, or anxious about their children's wellbeing

What Parenting Tends to Surface

Parenting has a way of bringing things to the surface that might otherwise stay buried. This is one of the reasons it can feel so destabilizing, and also one of the reasons it can be a profound opportunity for personal growth.

Your own attachment history

The way you were parented becomes a template, consciously or not, for how you parent. The gaps in what you received, the things that were done to you that you swore you'd never do, the patterns you absorbed before you had any ability to evaluate them, all of it shapes the parent you are. Making that visible is the beginning of choosing something different.

Your relationship with your own needs

Parenting requires enormous self-giving. For people who were already prone to self-erasure, it can accelerate an existing pattern of putting everyone else first until there is nothing left. For people who struggle with having needs, parenting can make it worse before it makes it better.

Your partnership, under pressure

Parenting is one of the greatest stressors a relationship can face. Differences in parenting philosophy, in what you each bring from your own families, in how you divide the load, in how you each cope when things are hard, all of these become visible and consequential in ways they weren't before.

Your relationship with control, uncertainty, and loss

Parenting means loving someone you cannot fully protect. It means tolerating a level of uncertainty and helplessness that is genuinely difficult for anyone, and especially difficult for people with anxiety or a history of trauma.

Parenting Stages and Transitions I Work With

Nothing prepares you fully for what it means to become a parent. The identity shift is total and it happens fast. The person you were before, your relationship to your body, your partnership, your sense of freedom and autonomy, your understanding of what your life is for, all of it reorganizes around this new role.
For many first-time parents, what arrives alongside the love is something unexpected: anxiety that won't quiet, grief about the life before, a relationship with their partner that looks nothing like it did, a sense of having lost themselves inside a role that consumes everything.
First-time parenthood also has a way of surfacing your own attachment history. The way you were parented shows up in how you parent, often in ways you didn't anticipate. If you grew up in a home where emotions weren't welcome, you may find yourself uncomfortable with your child's distress. If you had a parent who was unpredictable or unavailable, you may find yourself hypervigilant in ways that exhaust you. Therapy helps you see these patterns clearly enough to make different choices.
The postpartum period in particular carries its own psychological weight. If you're navigating postpartum depression, anxiety, or the identity disruption that follows birth, women's mental health therapy addresses that specifically.
Adding a second child is one of the most underestimated transitions in family life. The practical logistics multiply, but it's the psychological and relational dimensions that tend to catch people off guard.
Your firstborn is navigating a major loss: of your undivided attention, of the family configuration they've known, of the centrality they're used to. Their behavior will often reflect that loss in ways that can be hard to respond to with patience when you're exhausted and stretched thin. Meanwhile, the relationship between you and your partner, which survived (or barely survived) the first child, is asked to hold even more.
Therapy during this transition can help you process what this change is asking of you, support your relationship with your firstborn through their adjustment, and manage the guilt, exhaustion, and relational strain without losing yourself in it.
The early years of parenting are physically relentless and emotionally demanding in ways that are hard to overstate. You are chronically sleep-deprived, often touched-out, and operating at a level of sustained demand that would challenge anyone. And you are doing this while also being a person with your own history, your own needs, your own nervous system, which doesn't pause because you're in the thick of parenting young children.
This is also the stage where the intergenerational patterns become most visible. Young children's big emotions, their need for regulation, their testing of limits, all of it activates the places where your own emotional needs were met or not met. Therapy during the early parenting years isn't a luxury. It's often what makes the difference between surviving this stage and actually being present for it.
Parenting teenagers asks something different than parenting young children. The closeness of the early years gives way to something more complicated: a young person who needs you and is also actively separating from you, who challenges your authority and your values, who may be struggling in ways that are frightening to watch and difficult to reach.
For many parents, their teenager's struggles activate their own adolescent wounds. A child who is socially isolated brings back memories of your own loneliness. A teenager who is angry and distant reactivates old dynamics with your own parents. A child who is struggling academically can trigger your own relationship to achievement and worth.
Therapy helps you hold space for your teenager's experience without losing yourself in it, and to examine what their behavior is activating in you so that your responses are actually about them rather than your own history.
The relationship with an adult child is one of the most complex and least addressed areas of parenting. It requires a fundamental renegotiation: of your role, of the power dynamic, of what you can reasonably expect and offer. And it often comes loaded with grief, unresolved history, and a particular kind of helplessness that comes from loving someone deeply and having very little control over their choices.
Parents of adult children often struggle with: knowing how much to help versus when to step back, navigating a child's choices they disagree with or worry about, repairing a relationship that carries the weight of earlier difficult years, accepting a child's distance or estrangement, and figuring out who they are now that the active parenting years are behind them.
Therapy provides a space to process the grief and complexity of this stage without needing to resolve it neatly.

How I Work With Parents

Parenting therapy isn't parenting coaching. I'm not here to tell you what techniques to use or what your child needs. I'm here to help you understand what parenting is asking of you, what it's surfacing, and what would need to shift internally for your experience of parenting to actually change.

Understanding the Intergenerational Transmission

We look at what you absorbed from your own parents: the explicit messages and the implicit ones, the things that were done well and the things that left marks, the patterns you're trying to replicate and the ones you're trying to escape. Understanding the inheritance doesn't mean excusing it or getting lost in it. It means being able to see it clearly enough to make different choices.

Working with What Your Child Activates in You

Your child's behavior activates your nervous system. That's not a failure of parenting. It's biology. But what gets activated, and why, and how you respond, is where the work is. We look at the specific moments that are hardest for you, the emotions you have the most difficulty tolerating in your children, the behaviors that send you over the edge, and we trace those reactions to what they're actually about.

Supporting the Relational Strain

Parenting strains relationships. The partnership, the extended family, the friendships that have drifted. Therapy provides space to work through what parenting has done to your relationships, to grieve what has changed, how this impacts anxiety in the relationship, and to build the internal resources to navigate the relational complexity of this stage.

Holding the Grief and the Love Together

Parenting is full of grief that doesn't have a name. The loss of your pre-parent self. The stage your child just moved out of. The vision of parenthood you had before the reality arrived. The relationship with your child that you wished for and didn't quite get. Therapy creates space to hold that grief alongside the love, without having to choose between them.

Who Benefits from Therapy for Parents

New Parents Navigating the Identity Shift

If you find yourself:

Feeling like you've lost yourself inside a role that consumes everything
Struggling with anxiety, intrusive thoughts, or depression that arrived with parenthood
Surprised by how hard this is when you wanted it so much
Reacting in ways you don't recognize or like and not understanding why

Therapy addresses the full weight of what this transition is asking of you, beyond the logistics and the sleep deprivation.

Parents of Teenagers or Adult Children

If you experience:

Your teenager's struggles activating your own unresolved adolescent history
Helplessness watching a child make choices you can't control or influence
Grief about a relationship with your adult child that hasn't gone the way you hoped
The particular complexity of renegotiating a relationship with someone you raised

Therapy provides a space to process what this stage is asking of you without needing to fix it quickly.

Parents Who Recognize Their Own Patterns

If you notice:

Responding to your children in ways that look like your own parents
Activating in moments that seem disproportionate to what's actually happening
Repeating dynamics you swore you'd never repeat
A sense that your child is triggering something older than this relationship

Work focuses on making the inherited patterns visible and building the capacity to choose differently.

Parents Whose Relationship Is Strained

If you struggle with:

A partnership that has been significantly affected by the demands of parenting
Resentment, disconnection, or conflict that has grown since children arrived
Different parenting philosophies creating ongoing friction
A sense that you and your partner are co-managers rather than partners

Work addresses what parenting has surfaced in your relationship and builds the internal and relational resources to navigate it.

Common Questions about Therapy for Parents

This is individual therapy for you, the parent. We're not treating your child, assessing them, or working with them directly. The focus is entirely on your experience of parenting: what it's activating, what it's asking of you, and what would need to shift for things to feel different.
Your child may benefit from their own therapy, and if that's appropriate I can discuss options with you. But parents often underestimate how much their own work changes the dynamic at home. When you shift, the relationship shifts. For many families, a parent doing their own work creates more change than a child being seen alone.
Parenting is hard. That's true. But "this is just how it is" isn't a reason to not have support. You don't have to be in crisis to benefit from therapy. If you're struggling in a way that's affecting your ability to be the parent you want to be, that's enough reason to show up.

Sometimes, briefly. Becoming more aware of your patterns can bring some discomfort, especially when you start catching yourself mid-reaction. But most people find that awareness itself is a relief: it's less destabilizing to understand why you're reacting than to have reactions that feel out of your control. And the awareness is what makes change possible.
No. The research on this is clear: parents who have done their own processing of difficult childhood experiences are significantly less likely to pass those patterns on. You don't need a perfect history. You need enough awareness and willingness to look at it. That's what therapy supports.
It depends on what you're working on. If you're navigating a specific transition, like a new baby or a difficult stage with a teenager, a focused course of therapy over a few months can produce real change. If the work involves deeper patterns around your own history and attachment, the timeline is typically longer. Most people notice meaningful shifts within the first few months, with deeper change accumulating over time.