Tamara Halperin PsyD

Do you have concerns about your child’s behavior? Do you want to improve your relationship with your child? As parents, you’re never given a handbook on how to parent your child. So what do you do when they act out, misbehave, or have tantrums? PCIT is an evidence-based treatment for children 2-7 years old focused on decreasing negative behaviors. In PCIT, we aim to enhance the parent-child relationship to decrease negative behaviors and teach more effective discipline strategies.

Do you want to overcome past distressing experiences, improve your relationships, learn skills to manage your mood or decrease anger, anxiety or depression? Together we would identify the triggers to your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. You would learn healthy and effective coping tools to assist with emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and mindfulness. After building up your coping tools, we'll implement ERP and exposure based activities to reduce the intensity of the fears.

Individuals who have been exposed to abuse, neglect, or trauma may begin to struggle interpersonally, have difficulty trusting others, safety concerns, issues with power and control, intimacy issues, poor self esteem, increased anxiety, or difficulty sleeping. Utilizing a trauma informed lens, we would identify the impact of the traumatic experience. With a strength based approach, we would build upon your resiliency to decrease avoidance of trauma reminders and improve daily living.

CBT is an evidence-based treatment that identifies the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In therapy, you would learn healthy and effective coping tools to assist with emotion regulation, including managing and expressing their feelings. By recognizing unhealthy thought patterns, we can increase positive self-talk, self-confidence and self-esteem.

I integrate play into all evidence-based techniques to make therapy developmentally appropriate. Children learn best through play and interaction with supportive and engaged caregivers. Therapeutic work with children is different than working with adults. Children may not always be able to express themselves or their feelings, which can present as misbehavior. In therapy, I integrate therapy and play to meet the needs of the child and strengthen the parent-child relationship.

Many individual experience trauma or distressing events that affect their current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Youth who have been exposed to abuse, neglect, or trauma may begin to struggle academically, have increased anxiety, social isolation, tantrums, wet the bed, or nightmares. Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT) is an evidence-based treatment for youth ages 6-18 aimed to decrease trauma-related symptoms.