What if the issues your teenager is facing are real, and significant, and they have been trying to tell you that without knowing how to say it?
This is therapy for teens who are navigating more than the adults in their lives are fully seeing. For teenagers dealing with anxiety that will not quiet down, identity questions that do not have easy answers, social dynamics that feel impossible to survive, and a world that is moving very fast and asking them to keep up. For parents who can feel that something is wrong and cannot find a way in without making it worse.
At Embodied Therapy, teen issues are taken seriously. Not minimized, not reframed as phases, and not treated as problems to be fixed. Held.
If you recognized yourself in any of these, you are in the right place.
Being a teenager has always been hard. What teenagers are carrying right now is something different.
The pressure to perform academically, socially, and online while also figuring out who you are and what you believe and who you are allowed to be is a lot. More than most adults acknowledge. And most of the systems designed to support teenagers, schools, families, even the mental health system, were not built for the complexity of what adolescence looks like right now.
Teens who come to Embodied Therapy are usually still functioning. They go to school. They show up. They do what needs to be done. From the outside, things may look fine. On the inside, they are exhausted from the gap between who they actually are and what the world keeps asking them to perform.
Therapy here is not about fixing what is wrong with your teenager. It is about creating a space where they can actually be where they are, without having to manage how that lands on everyone else.
Teen issues is not a clinical term. It is a category that holds the enormous range of things that adolescents are navigating, things that are real and significant regardless of whether they meet a diagnostic threshold.
Some teens come to therapy because of challenges around family, friendships, school, or difficult life experiences. Others are struggling with anxiety, identity questions, emotional overwhelm, or a sense of disconnection. Often, it is a combination of both.
Today’s teens are growing up in a world shaped by social media, intense academic pressure, and increasing uncertainty. For many LGBTQIA+ teens and teens with marginalized identities, those challenges can feel even heavier. Therapy should make room for all of that context, because it is part of the story.
Anxiety is the most common reason teens come to therapy, and one of the most frequently missed. It does not always look like worry. It can look like avoidance. Irritability. Physical complaints. Getting sick before tests or social events. Staying so busy there is no room to feel anything. For many teens, anxiety has been running long enough that it feels like personality. It is not.
The pressure on teenagers to perform academically has intensified in ways that most adults did not experience themselves. The belief that every grade, every test, every extracurricular is building or destroying a future. Perfectionism that looks like motivation from the outside and feels like a slow collapse from the inside. Therapy helps teens build a different relationship with achievement, one that does not require them to constantly prove their worth.
The social world of adolescence is genuinely complicated and genuinely high-stakes to the people living inside it. Social anxiety. Exclusion. The constant calibration of how much of yourself to show and to whom. Friendships that feel intense and then fall apart. The specific loneliness of being in a room full of people and still feeling like you do not belong. These experiences are not trivial. They shape how teenagers understand themselves and what they are worth.
Social media has changed the landscape of adolescent identity development in ways researchers are still trying to understand. Constant comparison. A curated performance of a life that has nothing to do with the actual life. The specific pain of watching everyone else seem to know exactly who they are and what they are doing. At Embodied Therapy, the impact of social media on how a teen feels about themselves is part of the clinical picture, not a sidebar.
Figuring out your gender or sexual identity as a teenager is complicated in any environment. In environments that are not affirming, it can be genuinely dangerous to one's mental health and physical safety. Many LGBTQIA+ teens carry significant weight before they ever come out, managing the fear of rejection, navigating spaces that assume straightness and cisgender identity, and building an inner life that has no public space yet. Therapy here is explicitly affirming. Your teen does not need to be out to come in.
Many teens who come to therapy are navigating neurodivergence that was missed or misunderstood. ADHD that looks like laziness. Autism that looks like shyness or emotional sensitivity. The exhaustion of masking throughout the school day and having nothing left by the time they get home. A late diagnosis can be both a relief and a grief. Therapy can hold both.
Family relationships during adolescence are complicated by design. Teens are doing the developmental work of individuation, building an identity separate from their parents, and that process often looks like conflict. But some of what shows up as family conflict is something more: communication patterns that have stopped working, a teen who has shut down, a parent who cannot figure out how to reach them. Therapy can give teenagers a space to process family dynamics without having to perform loyalty to anyone.
Body image concerns are common in adolescence and frequently minimized by adults who see them as vanity rather than suffering. For some teens, these concerns slide into eating disorder territory. For others, they stay at the level of chronic dissatisfaction that costs something real every day. Either way, they deserve attention. See our eating disorder therapy page for more on that specific intersection.
Grief in teenagers is frequently underestimated. The loss of a person, a relationship, a version of life they expected to have, or even an earlier version of themselves. Grief does not follow a schedule or look a particular way, and adolescents are often expected to recover faster and more quietly than adults. Therapy creates room for grief to actually move.
Some teenagers come to therapy because they have found a way to cope that scares them. Self-harm, in various forms, is more common in adolescence than most people acknowledge, and it is almost never what people assume it is. It is a coping mechanism. A way of managing emotional pain that felt unbearable. Therapy here approaches self-harm with harm reduction, not shame. See our self-harm therapy page for more.
Transitions that look manageable from the outside can feel enormous from the inside. Starting high school. Ending high school. Leaving home. Navigating a family structure that has changed. The sense that everyone else knows what they are doing and you are the only one who does not. Therapy can help teenagers build enough internal ground to navigate those transitions with more steadiness.
Teenage suffering is often invisible to the adults around it. Not because teenagers are hiding it deliberately, but because the ways adolescents express distress do not always look like distress.
A teenager who is struggling might look like someone who is rude, withdrawn, unmotivated, always on their phone, or inexplicably emotional. The behaviors that worry parents are often adaptations to something the teen cannot name or does not know how to ask for help with.
From the outside, things may look like attitude. On the inside, there is often something much more specific going on.
Therapy gives teenagers somewhere to figure out what that something actually is.
Teenagers do not ask for help for reasons that make complete sense when you understand them.
They do not want to worry their parents. They do not believe what they are experiencing is serious enough. They have asked before and been dismissed. They do not have the language for what is happening. They are afraid of what getting help might mean about who they are. They do not think it will actually work.
None of these are obstacles. They are information. They tell us what kind of space a teenager needs before they can use therapy at all.
At Embodied Therapy, we do not expect teenagers to come in ready. We build the kind of relationship where readiness can develop.
Therapy with teens here does not look like a teenager sitting in a chair answering questions while an adult evaluates them. It looks like building a relationship with someone who has decided, tentatively, to give this a try.
We come to every session with curiosity first. The goal is not to produce a teenager who appears better. The goal is for the teenager to actually feel different inside. Those are not the same thing, and most teens can tell immediately which one a therapist is after.
Sessions are virtual. That matters for teenagers. No waiting room. No having to explain to siblings or extended family where they are going. No fluorescent lights. No sitting still in a way that is hard to sustain. They show up from wherever they are. Camera off is an option. Chat is an option when talking is hard. The session adapts to them, not the other way around.
Our founder is a queer, gender non-conforming, neurodivergent clinician. They do not need teenagers to explain their identity or their neurology before the actual work can begin. That context is already present.
For parents, we are not here to tell you what you did wrong. We are here to help you figure out what your teenager needs and how to show up for them in ways that actually reach them.
Teenagers who do this work often find they are able to:
Approaches are chosen together based on what actually fits each person’s brain, nervous system, and life. There is no single method that works for everyone.
Practical tools for managing intense emotions, building stronger relationships, and tolerating the moments that feel unbearable. DBT was designed for people whose emotional experience is more intense than average. It does not pathologize that intensity. It builds skills around it.
Helps teenagers identify what actually matters to them and build a life oriented around those values, even when the world is making that hard. Useful for anxiety, perfectionism, and identity questions.
Includes the body in the conversation. Especially helpful for teenagers whose anxiety shows up physically, or who have a hard time accessing their experience through words alone.
Addresses the thought patterns that fuel anxiety, low self-worth, and emotional dysregulation. Builds more accurate and more flexible ways of understanding themselves and the world.
Explores the different parts of a teenager's inner world with curiosity. Particularly useful for identity questions, for teens who feel like they are showing completely different versions of themselves in different contexts, and for teens who are trying to understand their own complexity.
For teenagers who are navigating trauma or experiences that have gotten stuck in the nervous system. Does not require detailed retelling of what happened.
Not a separate modality but a lens through which everything else is delivered. Masking is never required. Identity is never the problem.
This may be a good fit for a teen who:
This is also for parents and caregivers who are watching their teenager navigate something that feels bigger than what they know how to hold. You do not have to have the right words to reach out. If you want to learn more about parent support, read more here.
We see clients virtually. Our therapist is licensed in New Mexico, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.
Our founder, Allison VanGordon (they/she), has worked with adolescents across levels of care since the beginning of their clinical career. They are a queer, gender non-conforming, and neurodivergent therapist who understands what it means to not see yourself reflected in the adults around you. While this lived reality does not make them all-knowing, it does provide an inner knowing of the queer community. It is a lived experience that deeply shapes how they show up with teenagers.
Their training in DBT, EMDR, somatic approaches, and their ongoing PhD research focused on marginalized communities means they are equipped to hold the full complexity of what teenagers are navigating right now. They consistently focus their research and continuing education hours on staying up to date with the latest research in LGBTQIA+ spaces. This allows them to hold space for the intersection of identity, neurodivergence, family systems, academic pressure, and a political moment that is making the world less safe for some young people than others.
Read more about Embodied Therapy here and read more about Allison here.
Confidentiality for teenagers works differently than it does for adults and varies by age and state. In general, what is discussed in session stays in session unless there is a genuine safety concern. We talk through this clearly at the beginning so teenagers know exactly what to expect. The therapy space only works if it actually feels safe to use.
Forcing a therapeutic relationship creates something that looks like therapy but is not. If your teen is resistant, a parent support session is often a better starting point. We can talk through what the resistance might be communicating, what your teen might need before they are ready, and how to keep the door open without pushing them further away.
We hear this often. Some teenagers have experiences with therapy that felt pointless or performative, like talking to someone who was not really listening. If previous therapy was not helpful, that history matters and we want to know about it. It is not a reason to stop trying. It is information about what your teenager actually needs.
Yes. Our therapist is queer and gender non-conforming herself. Teenagers who are questioning or navigating their identity will not need to spend session time explaining who they are or managing a provider’s learning curve. The space is genuinely affirming, not just professionally tolerant of LGBTQIA+ clients.
Yes. The impact of social media on how teenagers understand themselves, compare themselves to others, and experience their social world is a clinical reality. We work with how the digital environment is showing up in a teenager’s actual life, not as a lecture about screen time, but as a real part of what they are navigating.
Both are things we work with directly. Please see our self-harm therapy page and our eating disorder therapy page for more specific information on those areas.
The intake session is $250.
Ongoing individual therapy sessions range from $85 to $155, depending on need and availability.
Family and parent support sessions range from $105 to $175.
Sliding scale options are available. You can check your eligibility instantly below no phone calls, no hassle.
Whether you are a teenager who is not sure where else to turn, or a parent who has been quietly scared for a while now, you do not need to have the right words before you reach out.
A free consultation is just a conversation. You ask questions. We ask questions. Together we figure out whether this feels like the right fit before anyone commits to anything.
