Getting through the divorce is one thing. Helping your kids through it is another.

AP
Clinically Reviewed By
Aaron Potratz, LPC · Co-Founder & Clinical Director, Life Discovery Counseling Services

You can manage the paperwork. You can get through the mediation. What you can't seem to fix is the way your eight-year-old goes quiet in the car on the way to the other house, or the way your teenager has started treating you like the enemy, or the way you sound on the phone with your ex when you can hear yourself doing it and can't stop.

Divorce and custody disputes put families under a specific kind of strain. Everyone is being asked to make good decisions while running on almost no reserve. Kids get caught carrying information they shouldn't have. Parents who genuinely love their children end up in patterns that hurt them. And the legal process, by design, is not built to help with any of that.

That's the part we work on.

What Brings Families Here

Your child is struggling and you don't know how much is normal

Sleep changes. Regression in a younger child. Grades slipping. Anger that seems out of proportion. Stomachaches on transition days. A kid who has decided everything is fine and refuses to talk about it. Some of this is the ordinary grief of a family reorganizing, and some of it is a signal that a child needs support. It is very hard to tell the difference from inside your own household, and it is not a failure to want help sorting it out.

Your child has been put in the middle

Sometimes deliberately. More often not. Kids in custody transitions become messengers, confidants, and negotiators, and they take on responsibility for adult emotions they cannot possibly manage. Therapy gives a child one relationship in the whole situation where they are not required to take a side or manage anyone.

You are trying to co-parent with someone you couldn't stay married to

Co-parenting communication work is not couples therapy and it is not reconciliation. It is a narrow, practical focus: how you exchange information, how you handle disagreement about the kids without escalating, and how you keep conflict off the children. It works best when both parents participate. It can still help when only one does, because half of a pattern is still enough to change.

You are the one falling apart and no one has asked about you

Divorce is a grief event. It usually arrives with financial fear, identity loss, and a social circle that quietly reorganizes without you. Most of the people around you are focused on the kids, and you are focused on the kids, and no one is looking at the fact that you are not sleeping. Individual therapy is for that.

The marriage involved abuse, coercion, or fear

High-conflict separations sometimes are not high-conflict at all. Sometimes one person is being harmed. If your relationship involved physical, sexual, emotional, or financial abuse, the work is different, and it starts with safety and stabilization rather than communication skills. We provide trauma and PTSD treatment, including EMDR and Brainspotting.

If any of this is landing, that's worth acting on. Call us at (971) 808-2686 or schedule at lifedcs.clientsecure.me. Most new clients are seen within two to four weeks, and our intake team can verify your insurance benefits before the first appointment.

What We Offer

Counseling for children and teens

Ages 2 through young adult. Play-based work for younger children, who process through play rather than conversation. Talk and skills-based work for older kids and teens. Parents are involved throughout, because a child's progress is inseparable from what happens at home. More on our approach in child and teen counseling.

Co-parenting communication counseling

Structured, goal-focused sessions on the mechanics of raising children across two households: boundaries, handoffs, decision-making, and conflict de-escalation. There is no relationship-repair goal. The work is about the children and the logistics that surround them.

Individual therapy for parents

Grief, anxiety, depression, anger, identity, and the practical work of rebuilding. See also counseling for men, since men in divorce are frequently the last people in the family to get support.

Couples and relationship counseling

Couples work where a couple is still deciding, or where a new relationship is being introduced into an existing custody arrangement.

Online therapy across Oregon

Telehealth is useful when a co-parent has moved, when the parenting schedule makes in-person sessions difficult, or when a teen splits time between households in different parts of the state.

Faith-integrated care, if you want it

Divorce inside a faith community brings its own weight: shame, judgment, and hard questions about what you were taught. Our clinicians can work explicitly within a Christian framework or set it aside entirely. Your choice, and you can change your mind. See Christian counseling.

How We Work

We start with the child's actual experience, not the legal dispute. We do not need to know who filed, who is at fault, or what the pleadings say. We need to know what your child's days look like.

We tell you what we're seeing. Parents get regular feedback. You will not sit in the waiting room for six months wondering what is happening.

We move at your child's pace, not the court's. Litigation timelines and healing timelines have nothing to do with each other, and we won't pretend otherwise.

We don't take sides. If both parents are involved in a child's treatment, both are treated as parents. Our alignment is with your child's wellbeing, which sometimes means saying things neither adult wanted to hear.

Important: what we don't provide

We are a treatment practice. We do not perform custody evaluations or parenting time evaluations, we do not provide reunification therapy, and we do not make custody or parenting time recommendations, write letters advocating for one parent, or offer opinions to a court. If one of our clinicians is subpoenaed, they testify only as a fact witness: what they observed and what treatment they provided. Those are separate professional roles, and ethical standards prohibit the same clinician from being both your family's therapist and the neutral evaluator in your case.

This protects your family. A therapist who is positioning for court cannot be fully present for your child.

Read what we do and don't provide in court-involved cases, including what records and information we can release, and where to look instead.

Ready to get started? Call us at (971) 808-2686 or schedule online. Most new clients are seen within two to four weeks.

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