Therapy for fathers in Vermont —

Becoming a father changes you. Not just your schedule — your nervous system

Nobody hands you a map for this. One day you're a person with a life you mostly recognize, and the next you're responsible for a small, entirely dependent human — and something in you shifts that you didn't sign up to examine. Old patterns surface. Old wounds get poked. Parts of you show up that you haven't seen since you were a kid yourself.

If you're a father who feels more anxious, more irritable, more disconnected, or more overwhelmed than you expected — you're not broken, and you're not alone. You're having a completely normal reaction to one of the biggest identity shifts a person can go through.

Why fatherhood activates old material

Becoming a parent doesn't just add a new role to your life. It reorganizes your internal system. The way you were fathered — whether that looked like warmth, absence, criticism, silence, or something in between — becomes active material the moment you're holding your own kid. You may notice:

- A short fuse you don't recognize in yourself

- Numbness or distance where you expected to feel bonded

- Anxiety that spikes around your child's safety or your own competence

- Old grief about your own childhood, sometimes out of nowhere

- Pressure to be the strong, unbothered one — while quietly struggling

- Tension in your relationship as roles and expectations shift

- A sense that you're either repeating your father's patterns or overcorrecting so hard you've lost yourself

This isn't a personal failing. It's what happens when the parts of you that hold your earliest attachment experiences get activated by parenting your own child. Naming that — and working with it directly — is the fastest way through it.

How I work with fathers

I'm a father myself. My daughter is a year and a half old, and fatherhood has been every bit as disorienting and clarifying as I tell my clients it will be. I bring both lived experience and clinical training to this work — I'm not guessing at what this stage stirs up.

Clinically, I use Internal Family Systems (IFS), an approach built around understanding the different parts of you — the part that's anxious about being a good enough dad, the part that shuts down under pressure, the part still carrying something from your own childhood — and helping them work together instead of hijacking you. IFS is especially well-suited to fatherhood work because so much of what gets activated in new dads is old, protective, and part-based. We're not just managing symptoms; we're getting curious about what's actually driving them.

I also draw on attachment-focused work, since so much of the fatherhood transition is really an attachment story — both the one you're building with your child, and the one you're revisiting from your own upbringing.

What we might work on together

- Processing the identity shift into fatherhood

- Understanding and interrupting patterns inherited from your own father

- Managing anxiety, anger, or numbness that surfaced after becoming a dad

- Navigating relationship strain with a partner during the transition

- Making sense of paternal postpartum depression or anxiety — which is real, underdiscussed, and treatable

- Reconnecting with parts of yourself that feel like they got lost in the transition

- Building the kind of internal steadiness you actually want to bring to your kid

A note on strength and silence

A lot of men come to this work already having decided they should be able to handle it alone. If that's you: the ability to sit with what's activated in you — instead of pushing it down or powering through — isn't weakness. It's the same quality that will let you actually show up for your kid instead of just performing composure for them. That's the work.

Getting started

I offer both in-person sessions in Montpelier and telehealth across Vermont, so this work is accessible whether you're local or elsewhere in the state.