The question I bring to every client is not only what is wrong, but what is needed and how to build the conditions under which this particular girl, in this particular life, can actually thrive.
Anxiety is the most common mental health condition affecting young Australians, and rates among adolescent girls have been rising steadily for over a decade. Behind every statistic is a girl who is exhausted, and a family doing everything they can.
How I work
Anxiety is a starting point, not a destination.
When a girl is struggling — avoiding school, unable to sleep, caught in cycles of worry she cannot switch off — the first task is to understand what is happening and build the skills to meet it. I begin with the Cool Kids program, developed at Macquarie University and one of the most rigorously validated approaches to childhood and adolescent anxiety in the world. Structured, evidence-based, and genuinely effective. For many families, that work is transformative on its own. For others, it opens a longer conversation.
Anxiety rarely exists in isolation. As a social worker I am trained to look at the full picture — biological, psychological, social and environmental — and that biopsychosocial lens shapes everything I do. Behind the avoidance and the perfectionism there is almost always something the nervous system has been trying to manage, often for a long time, often for reasons that made complete sense when they developed. I look at the stress load across every domain of a girl's life — biological, emotional, cognitive, social and prosocial — and at the foundations that domain rests on: what is she actually sleeping, eating, moving, connecting? A nervous system cannot regulate beyond its resources. Understanding where the load is coming from changes what we do about it.
Why the work goes deeper
Cool Kids builds the skills to meet anxiety. What I add is a rigorous understanding of why the anxiety is there, what it has been carrying, and what needs to change in the whole system for something to genuinely shift.
Adolescence is a period of profound neural reorganisation. The developing brain is more plastic, more sensitive to social experience, and more vulnerable to chronic stress than at almost any other point in development. The relationships a girl has during this period are literally shaping the architecture she will carry into adulthood — which means the relational system around her is not context for the work. It is the work.
Underneath the behaviour there is also an internal world — patterns that developed early, often as protection, and are now getting in the way. Meeting those patterns with curiosity rather than pressure, understanding what they have been carrying, is where something different becomes possible.
And my doctoral research was unambiguous on this: belonging, competence and autonomy are not nice-to-haves. They are the conditions under which anxiety loosens its grip. Rebuilding them — in a girl's relationship with her body, her sense of who she is, and the people who matter most — is what this work is oriented toward.
What we are working toward is a girl who is calm enough to think, connected enough to belong, and grounded enough in herself to meet whatever adolescence puts in front of her.
Ways to work together
Individual therapy: For girls (and their families) where anxiety is getting in the way of everyday life. Strengths-based, biopsychosocial, and shaped to what this particular person in this particular system actually needs.
The Belonging Program: A structured 8-week program built around the four areas research consistently identifies as most protective of girls' mental health: nervous system literacy, movement, identity and confidence, and social and digital life.
Speaking and workshops: For schools, workplaces and conferences on adolescent girls' mental health and what families and organisations can do that actually makes a difference.
Next step?
I offer a free 20-minute introductory call. A chance to talk through what is happening and see whether this feels like the right fit, get in touch.