Our Services
Many events can leave us feeling adrift and uncertain about how to move forward — adolescence, global pandemic, past trauma, recent changes in relationships. Los Altos Psychotherapy can work with you to uncover and resolve the underlying causes of these feelings and behaviors to make lasting positive change.
Our therapists work with clients on a wide range of personal and family challenges, including depression, anxiety, and disrupted family systems. We specialize in difficult to resolve issues like trauma, eating disorders, and teens in crisis.
Trauma
You may not have words for past trauma, but you can feel it each day in your thoughts and emotions. Traumatic events, particularly as a child, take an ongoing toll on our lives and can keep us stuck in patterns we want to change. In the meantime it continues to live in our bodies, where it may appear as depression, anxiety, addiction, or general relationship issues.
Trauma needs company to be expressed and resolved. This is where Los Altos Psychotherapy can help. A trained therapist can sit with you in the dark places and hard feelings to uncover thoughts and ideas that have been repressed. We go as fast or as slow as you are comfortable going. Throughout, our focus is on providing a trusting environment of compassionate support to first understand and then to heal.
Teens in Crisis
Being a teenager, or the parent of teenager, is never easy. A global pandemic has just brought more challenges with significant increases in anxiety and depression, as well as more severe behaviors such as self-harm, binging, and eating disorders. For the teenager dealing with the pressures of growing up in Silicon Valley and the parent dealing with your own stresses in life this can all feel overwhelming.
At Los Altos Psychotherapy we help teens who are struggling to launch into the world. We work with them to understand their inner world and discover what has them stuck in their thoughts and feelings. By exploring their patterns of behaviors and confronting their inner critics we work to change this internal world view. This gives them a new outlook, new ability to communicate, and a set of tools as they set out on their own.
Parents play a critical role and provide valuable input to the treatment process. Parents often work with a different member of the Los Altos Psychotherapy team to deal with their own experience of the teen in crisis. The goal is to help parent and child see each other in a new light as you develop new ways of communicating with each other.
Eating Disorders
Franky, you probably don’t want to talk about your eating disorder. Eating disorders, such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating, are complicated and often kept well hidden from the outside world. The good news is that you are not your eating disorder. You can come to understand your disorder, better manage it, and chart your path forward.
The Los Altos Psychotherapy team has deep experience working with long-term eating disorders, including clients who have recently completed residential or outpatient treatment programs. We meet you where you are, and move treatment forward at your pace. As trust is established we work with you to understand the history of the disorder and its impacts on you and the relationships around you. This is intensive and demanding work that often explores past traumas, but is critical to the road to recovery. Throughout we work collaboratively with medical doctors, nutritionists, treatment programs, and other members of your care team.
