Individual therapy
Ongoing therapy for teens and children navigating anxiety, attention, mood, and regulation.
Therapy and parent coaching for children and families
There is nothing wrong with your kid, and there is nothing wrong with you.
Support for parents of deeply feeling children, and for teens carrying anxiety, attention, or mood struggles — grounded in understanding what is underneath the behavior.
Services
Ways we can work together.
Compare the available formats and begin with the one that best matches your situation.
Family therapy
Work that includes parents and child together, focused on the mismatch between how each of you is wired.
Initial intake appointment
A longer first appointment to understand the history, the current pattern, and what you most want to change.
Parent coaching
Focused work with parents on responding to a deeply feeling child from a settled place rather than a defensive one.
Who this is for
When you have read the books and it still is not landing.
You do not need to arrive with the problem already figured out.
Your child is often described as strong-willed, deeply feeling, or hard to bring back down once upset.
Everyday requests turn into power struggles, and the blow-ups have started to feel too big.
You hold high expectations for your family and are unsettled by how far the reality is from them.
You have read some of the books, searched online, and maybe tried a therapist who was not the right fit.
Your therapist
Meet River Johnson.
Founder and therapist
River Johnson
I work with parents who are doing everything they can think of and still feel like they are getting it wrong.
My work starts from the premise that all behavior makes sense. We slow down enough to understand what is underneath a child's outbursts, shutdowns, or refusals, so that a parent's response can come from their own values rather than from feeling cornered. Sessions are collaborative — I work as a detective alongside you rather than handing you a list of techniques.
- Power struggles and listening
- Emotional regulation
- Anxiety in children and teens
- Parent and child mismatch
How the work feels
All behavior makes sense.
We start by naming the goals that matter to you, then work out together what is driving the moments that keep going wrong. Expect a lot of validation and very little lecturing: I work as a detective alongside you rather than telling you what to do.
- Focus on what is driving the behavior rather than a script of techniques
- Work with the parent and the child, not the child alone
- Collaborative sessions built around goals you name