Our Work

Our Offerings

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis offers an expansive space for deep work with self, relationships, history, and the unknown. Sessions occur 3-5x per week. This service is best suited for people seeking deeper awareness of their unconscious mind and the freedom of surprises, play, and novel insights.

Psychotherapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy incorporates past, present, and the relationship between patient and therapist to support growth and wellbeing. Sessions occur 1-2x per week. This service is ideal for children, adolescents, and adults who want to move beyond quick tools and skills to find the internal motivation, creativity, and tolerance for uncertainty that foster long-lasting change.

Psychological Assessment

Psychological assessment is a broad service that incorporates multiple methods to learn more about a patient’s strengths, vulnerabilities, and development. Assessment is appropriate for complex cases where individuals may require accommodation, encounter significant difficulties in their environment, or desire of comprehensive picture of their development.

Consultation

We offer consultation for psychotherapists and psychological assessors. Although we work from a psychoanalytic orientation, we welcome opportunities to consult with colleagues of any orientation. Common foci for consultation include work with:

  • Neurodiversity and neurodivergent experience

  • Gender diversity

  • Gay and queer folks

  • Trauma

  • Psychological assessment (Rorschach, Neurodevelopment, Learning)

Psychotherapy

  • We offer psychotherapy to children who have begun elementary school. Psychodynamic play therapy is the primary modality. Play is a lifelong resource for emotional expression, building insight, creativity, and developing relationships. Children use play as a means of working through core dilemmas. Challenges enter the treatment room and play allows the therapist to support the child to work through these challenges and generalize these insights to all areas of their life.

    Consistency is essential to develop the trusting relationship this modality requires. For that reason, we ask that children attend sessions at the same time each week.

    Parents are central in their child’s life and the leading experts in their child. Parent involvement is key to the success of therapy, so we ask parents attend a session with their child’s clinician once a month.

  • Adolescence is an exciting and dynamic stage of life where change is rapid and emotions amplify. We offer relational psychodynamic therapy to teens to support their transition to adulthood.

    Therapy sessions take place each week.

    Privacy is an important component of adolescent work that allows them to begin to attune to their inner desires and values and mobilize this insight in their transition to adulthood.

  • We treat adults across the lifespan, using psychodynamic therapy as our primary modality. Sessions occur once or twice a week.

    Initial sessions are an opportunity for you and your therapist to see what it might be like to work together and whether this fits your needs and goals.

Psychological Assessment: A Multi-Method Deep Dive

  • Our approach to psychological assessment is holistic and multi-method. We use a diverse array of tools (record review, interviews, rating measures, normed testing measures, and projectives) to craft a comprehensive report of an individual that holds their complex ecology in mind.

    An initial survey and phone consultation allows us to gather more detailed information about your needs and offer guidance on whether we can serve you.

    From there, the assessment process begins in earnest and can include further interviews, administration of specialized assessments in-office, and feedback sessions with your clinician.

    At the end, you receive a comprehensive report and children / teens receive a feedback story or letter.

  • Patients (or their parents) often seek assessment to clarify a diagnosis, to determine whether accommodations are warranted, and to support an ongoing psychotherapy.

    Psychological assessors are ethically bound to give serious consideration to diagnosis. We concur. Still, many assessors enjoy this work because it is more than diagnosis. People are more than diagnosis.

    At Tide Pools, we offer a comprehensive, tailored, assessment to those committed to investing in a deep exploration of their (or their child’s) strengths and needs.

    An autism diagnosis denotes a person with social communication and sensory processing differences but it does not offer a window into how an individual autistic person experiences their self and their world.

    Our assessments plans make use of tools that shed light on a person’s unconscious dynamics - insight that can clarify challenges in treatment and life and support holistic development.

    The most valuable part of an assessment is the collaborative conversation that structures the process - and the unique insights it offers into a patient’s world. These build empathy for the patient and with themselves.