About Erik
The grown-up in the room.
I'm Erik. I've worked with children and their parents for years — as a therapist, as a parent coach, and, honestly, as someone who pays attention to how kids actually work. Not how we wish they worked. How they really do.
When I'm with a child, I try to do the thing that I think most kids don't get enough of: I slow down. I follow their pace. I watch what they're drawn to and what they avoid. I don't rush, I don't push, and I don't pretend to know what something means before they show me.
Kids are smart about their own healing. Given the right conditions — safety, time, connection, and a grown-up who isn't trying to fix them — they'll start doing the work themselves. This may sound like magic, but it isn't. It's natural, healthy development. Children don't need a solution; they need to know how to adjust so they can keep growing in the way they were already built to grow.
What I actually believe about children
Children's behavior is almost never the problem. It's a signal. Something underneath — a fear, a loss, a nervous system running too fast, a need that isn't getting met — is trying to get our attention.
So when a kid starts melting down, refusing school, waking up at night, hitting, shutting down, or repeating a pattern nobody can figure out — I don't come in with a behavior plan. I come in with curiosity. What is this child's story? What are they carrying? What inner resources are they already using? Where are they stuck, and what's the next small step their system is ready for?
The saying goes: give a person a fish, or teach them to fish. With a child, it's something gentler — through play, we help them notice the resources that are already inside them. Imagination, connection, attention, the ability to feel and be felt. Once a child can sense those, they carry them everywhere.
How I work
My main tool with children is sand tray therapy, a form of play therapy that lets a child build whole worlds out of a shallow tray of sand and a shelf full of small figures. It sounds simple. It is anything but. Play is how children practice being alive. It's how they test out what's scary, try on what's powerful, rehearse what they need to grow into. In the tray, kids get to feel the success of working something out in the language they were born speaking.
I also bring in somatic and body-based attention — noticing when a child's system gets overwhelmed, and helping them gently come back to a place where they can handle what's in front of them. Pacing and co-regulation are essential. A child's nervous system learns to settle by being beside a settled one. That steady, attuned presence is the work — not a technique applied to them, but a relationship they can lean into. Attachment, connection, and safety are what let everything else become possible.
And I work with you. Parents are part of the work, not on the outside of it. Most of what I do with parents is support and education — about attachment, about development, about what step is coming next for your child and how to be ready for it. Sometimes nothing is wrong with a parent at all; you just don't know what the next step is because it hasn't been taken yet. So I help you take it, and your child follows. Or your child takes it, and I help you follow them. Either way, it's collaboration, and it's the most important part of the work.
Credentials & training
I hold a Master's in Counseling Psychology and I'm a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) in Kansas, plus a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in Washington. My training centers on child development, attachment, somatic and play/sand tray therapy, with depth psychology supporting the whole.
If you want the longer version of my background — the adult work, the couples and family work, the theoretical grounding — that lives on my main About page.
Outside the office
I live in Kansas City. I'm not a parent myself, but I've spent years sitting with parents and their children — close enough to know the difference between how parenting looks in a book and how it feels at 6:47 on a Tuesday evening. I take this work seriously. I don't take myself too seriously. Kids usually sense the difference.
Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.
— Peter A. Levine