Trauma-Focused Therapy for Children, Adolescents & Adults

Kirsten is co-founder of Mosaic Minded Counseling and a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor, and Certified DIR Practitioner. She works with children, adolescents, and adults navigating trauma, difficult relationships, emotional and behavioral challenges, neurodivergence, substance use, and experiences that have changed the way they see themselves, other people, or the world around them.

Areas of Focus

• Complex Trauma & PTSD

• Childhood Trauma

• Emotional Neglect & Emotional Abuse

• Attachment & Relationship Trauma

• Children & Adolescents

• Autism, ADHD & Neurodivergence

• Emotional Regulation & Impulsivity

• Anxiety & Depression

• Substance Use & Addictive Behaviors

• Family Conflict & Difficult Relationships

• Identity, Self-Esteem & Self-Understanding

Working With Children & Adolescents

Kirsten has a particular passion for working with children and adolescents who have experienced trauma, emotional neglect or abuse, attachment disruptions, family conflict, loss, instability, or other difficult experiences.

Children do not always have the language to explain what is happening internally. Trauma and distress may instead show up through anger, impulsivity, anxiety, withdrawal, perfectionism, intense emotional reactions, difficulty trusting others, shutting down, challenging behavior, or struggles at home and school.

Rather than focusing only on how to stop a behavior, Kirsten works to understand what the behavior may be communicating and what the child needs underneath it.

Using play-based, relational, attachment-focused, and developmentally appropriate approaches, she helps children communicate and process experiences in ways that feel natural to them. Therapy may focus on safety, emotional awareness, regulation, relationships, self-understanding, and helping a child make sense of experiences without allowing those experiences to define them.

When appropriate, Kirsten works collaboratively with parents and caregivers to help them better understand their child’s behavior, emotional needs, triggers, and nervous system.

Trauma Therapy Across the Lifespan

Trauma does not always come from one catastrophic event.

It can also develop through repeated experiences of emotional neglect, instability, criticism, rejection, unsafe relationships, family dysfunction, chronic stress, or growing up without having important emotional needs recognized or met.

Kirsten works with adolescents and adults who may understand intellectually that something happened in the past but continue to feel its effects in relationships, emotions, coping strategies, self-esteem, substance use, or their sense of safety.

Her goal is not simply to reduce symptoms, but to help clients understand why their nervous system, emotions, relationships, and coping patterns developed the way they did—and decide what they want to do differently now.

Neurodivergent-Affirming Therapy

As a Certified DIR Practitioner, Kirsten has specialized experience supporting autistic, ADHD, and otherwise neurodivergent children, adolescents, and adults.

Her approach is neurodiversity-affirming and focused on understanding the individual rather than forcing someone to conform to a predetermined idea of how they should think, communicate, regulate, or function.

Kirsten is particularly interested in the intersection of neurodivergence and trauma, including the emotional impact of masking, chronic misunderstanding, rejection, unmet sensory needs, and repeatedly feeling different or misunderstood.

Substance Use & Coping

As a Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor, Kirsten also works with adolescents and adults whose coping may involve alcohol or substance use, gambling, impulsive behavior, or other patterns that have become difficult to control.

Her approach is nonjudgmental and curious. Rather than reducing someone to a behavior or diagnosis, she works to understand the function the behavior serves—whether that is relief, stimulation, connection, escape, regulation, or simply surviving something that otherwise feels intolerable.

Kirsten’s Approach

Kirsten’s style is relational, direct, compassionate, curious, and deeply nonjudgmental.

The relationships she develops with clients are built through trust, humor, authenticity, and a willingness to sit with complexity rather than reducing people to diagnoses or symptoms.

Whether working with a child whose distress is showing up through behavior, a teenager struggling to understand themselves, or an adult recognizing patterns that began years ago, Kirsten’s goal is to help clients move from:

“What is wrong with me?” to “This makes sense. Now what do I want to do with it?”