The Clinicians
About Therapy with Jacklyn Giampa
Your Teen Doesn’t Need Another Adult Telling Them What’s Wrong With Them
When a child or teenager is struggling, parents often become detectives.
You notice the anxiety. The shutdowns. School becoming harder. Friendships changing. Emotional reactions that seem enormous. ADHD or autistic traits becoming more visible.
Every detail gets logged, and none of it adds up to an explanation.
The detective work is exhausting, and you keep doing it because nobody else is going to.
Why Your Child Has Not Told You What Is Happening
Some children cannot put the experience into sentences. Others could and would rather not. Neither one means you missed something.
Either way, you are left assembling the picture from outside of it.
Your child already feels evaluated by teachers, coaches, clinicians, and every adult who has been worried enough to ask a question about them. One more evaluation changes nothing.
Therapy with Jacklyn is designed to feel different.
Make the Relationship Come Before Anything Else
Kids and teens can tell the difference between an adult who wants to know them and an adult who wants a behavior to stop.
Jacklyn builds that first kind of relationship before anything else happens in the room.
What comes next depends on your child’s age and what they need: conversation, creativity, CBT-based tools, ways to handle a big feeling without it running the whole day, or the patient work of finding words for an experience they have never been able to explain.
Some of that happens in talking. For a younger child, most of it happens in play, which is how they say the things that will not fit into sentences yet.
You Stay Part of This While Your Child Gets a Space of Their Own
Parents and families can be part of the process, and your child still keeps a space that feels like their own. Both of those hold at once, and you come away with a clearer sense of what is happening and what to try at home.
Jacklyn is working toward a child who understands themselves better, builds coping skills they actually use, accepts who they are, and feels more confident in the world around them. Fewer difficult moments come along with that.
That is a longer project than getting through this week, and it is the one worth starting.
About Jacklyn Giampa, LMHC
Hi, I’m Jacklyn. I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with a strong background in children, adolescents, developmental disabilities, neurodivergence, trauma, and family work.
My career started in human services, working with adults with developmental disabilities. I studied psychology and education at UMass Amherst, then earned my master’s degree in Mental Health and School Adjustment Counseling at Cambridge College with a focus on trauma.
My style is warm, authentic, affirming, and flexible. I draw from person-centered therapy, play therapy, CBT, and other approaches depending on the client.
What I particularly enjoy is helping kids and teens recognize that the things that make life harder are not the entirety of who they are.
Start With What You’ve Been Noticing
You have been keeping track of all of this by yourself for a while now.
Send a message through this site and tell me what you have been seeing at home. From there we can talk about whether I am the right fit for your child.
Tell Us Where You’d Like This to Move
You don’t need the whole thing figured out before you write to us.
Some people know exactly which kind of therapy they want. Others know only that something isn’t working anymore, and that’s enough to start with.
Tell us what’s been going on, what you’ve already tried, and what you’d like to feel different. We’ll think it through with you and point you toward the therapist and the approach that fit.
You’ve done plenty of understanding already, and now it’s worth finding out what gets it moving.