Services

Therapy for younger children (aged 7-12) within a family systems approach

Dr. Fox believes that building a safe and trusting therapeutic alliance is at the center of any potential change, growth, or repair. She understands that families represent their own systems, with invisible operating rules. Dr. Fox operates within a contemporary psychodynamic approach with an emphasis on family systems and attachment research. Often she employs cognitive-behavioral techniques (such as targeting cognitive distortions and challenging thinking patterns) within her clinical framework. The therapeutic process used for children initially entails collaboration around identifying and describing the present problem(s) and treatment goals in the young client’s terms. When working with younger children, it is important for therapy to include parental or caregiver involvement in order to effectively illuminate, challenge, and support the context of the child; intent on thoughtfully engaging the family system around the tender places that need attention and intervention. Depending upon the child, Dr. Fox’s approach with younger children can include on-site consultation with key teachers and school support staff. She values classroom observation as a means of identifying symptoms of the presenting problem in real time. Depending upon the goals of treatment, family therapy components with younger children can include fostering effective communication, building intimacy, diffusing patterns of escalation, targeting problem behaviors, coping with fears and worries, creating tangible and individualized reward systems, restoring power in the parent/child dynamic, providing parental support and intervention strategies, expanding social awareness and empathy, and practicing appropriate and adequate limit setting. Dr. Fox believes in empowering, not enabling, young children and adolescents as they cope with the experience of growing up.

Therapy for adolescents

Dr. Fox is passionate about working with adolescents as they traverse the inherently complex and often disorienting experience of growing up, developing autonomy, and finding their own voice during this critical developmental period. Dr. Fox understands that the efficacy of any therapeutic work is rooted in the relationship established with her clients. She maintains a contemporary psychodynamic approach, with an emphasis on family systems and attachment as a means of developing insight, promoting self-awareness, and motivating change. Often she employs targeted cognitive-behavioral interventions as a way of highlighting and challenging distorted or rigid cognitive thinking patterns, behaviors that may be getting in the client’s way. Dr. Fox is certified in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and utilizes these techniques when aligned with the adolescent’s treatment goals. Dr. Fox values integrating elements of therapeutic assessment in her work with adolescents in order to provide rich evidence-based data and insight around the presenting problem and treatment goals.  Often, therapy with adolescents includes parental involvement. It is of utmost importance to Dr. Fox to foster safe, effective, positive communication skills within the family in a way that honors accountability and truth as the platform for a healthy emerging sense of self.

Couples Therapy

A large part of Dr. Fox’s practice includes psychotherapy with couples.  Dr. Fox provides an empathic safe space for couples to deepen and enrich insight,  promote mutual understanding, and practice successful, effective communication skills.  She values exploring her couples’ own distinct and complex relational roadmaps as an agent for fostering the kind of inherently personal culture the couple desires.  Couples seek therapy in order to resolve built up resentments, confront ruptures in trust, promote intimacy and connection, and transform punishing and alienating patterns into loving, supportive ones.