Teen Therapy for Divorce and Family Change in Santa Monica & Los Angeles
Divorce and family breakdown are among the most destabilizing experiences a teenager can face disrupting their sense of security, their daily routines, and their understanding of the relationships they have always counted on. The impact can show up as depression, anxiety, acting out, academic decline, or a withdrawal from the adults in their lives.
Dr. Sally Hackman, PhD, MFT, has extensive experience helping teenagers in Santa Monica and Los Angeles process the emotional consequences of divorce, parental separation, and family loss including the death of a parent. She provides a stable, confidential therapeutic relationship at a time when the rest of a teenager’s world may feel deeply unstable.
Dr. Hackman also often helps parents develop and change the custody and or living arrangement, if its seems needed. She oftens work with parents to create and sustain a healthy post divorce co parenting relationship.
What Actually Harms Children and What Does Not
This is worth being clear about, because parents carry a lot of guilt about it.
Divorce itself is not what damages children. Decades of research point consistently at three other things: ongoing conflict between parents, a child being caught between them, and instability in day-to-day life.
Children who move between two calm homes generally do well. Children who stay in one home with parents who fight constantly often do not.
That is not meant to minimise anything. It means the thing most within your control how the two of you handle each other in front of your child matters more than the fact of the separation.
Living Between Two Homes
Children adapt to two homes better than most parents expect, provided a few things hold.
The practical details matter more than they seem to. Where their things are. Whether they have to pack a bag every week. Whether someone remembers the science project is due at the other house. A child who is constantly managing logistics is carrying an adult’s job.
What is harder is the emotional switching being one version of themselves in one house and another in the other. Children who feel they cannot mention one parent in front of the other end up leading two separate lives, and that is genuinely exhausting for them.
When a New Partner Arrives
This is often harder than the divorce, and usually less anticipated.
A new relationship makes the separation final in a way the paperwork did not. Children who had accepted the situation can regress significantly. There may be loyalty to the other parent, jealousy over attention, or resentment of someone who has authority without having earned it.
Timing and pacing matter, and there is no formula. But a child who is given some say in how quickly things move usually does better than one presented with a fait accompli.
How Therapy Helps
The single most useful thing therapy offers a child of divorced parents is a space that belongs to neither household.
Everywhere else, a child is aware of the effect of what they say. With Dr. Hackman they are not managing anyone. They can be angry at a parent without it being reported, or admit they miss the other house without it being taken as a verdict. The work itself usually covers separating what is theirs from what is their parents’, letting go of responsibility they have taken on, and rebuilding a sense that their own life is allowed to continue.
Key Points
A Steady Presence in an Unstable Time.
Empowering Resilience
Help your teenager make sense of what has happened, process their grief and anger, and develop the resilience to build their own life even amid family change.
Healing Space
A private, confidential space that is entirely the teenager's own separate from the family conflict, and where they never have to take sides or manage adult feelings.
Transformative Support
Dr. Hackman works with teenagers through the full range of family disruption separation, divorce, stepfamily adjustment, the death of a parent, and the complex loyalty conflicts that family change often creates.
How It Shows Up at Different Ages
Younger Children
Under about seven, children often cannot separate cause from effect. They may believe they caused it, or that being good enough will undo it. Regression is common: bedwetting, clinginess, sleep difficulties, behaviour that had been settled for years.
School-Age Children
Between seven and twelve, children understand what has happened and often feel they must manage it. Some become the peacemaker. Some take sides. Many become very good at seeming fine, because they can see their parents are struggling and do not want to add to it.
Teenagers
Teenagers often react with anger rather than sadness, and the anger lands unevenly usually on whichever parent feels safer to be angry at. Some withdraw from the family entirely. Some become critical of one parent in a way that is painful for everyone. Trust in relationships generally, not just their parents’, can take a hit.
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Years of Teen Therapy Experience
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Serving Santa Monica Continuously
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Confidential — Always
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First Session Free If You Don't Return
FAQ
Common Questions
In most cases yes. Where parents share legal custody, both usually need to consent to a child starting therapy. If custody arrangements are unusual or contested, bring the details to the first conversation and Dr. Hackman will tell you what is possible. This is a legal question as much as a clinical one, and it is worth checking with your attorney.
No. Dr. Hackman's client is your child, and session content stays confidential from both households. She will share guidance and general progress with parents, but not what was said. A child who believes
their words will travel to either parent will not speak freely, and
the work stops there.
Not necessarily many children genuinely do adjust well. But it is worth knowing that appearing fine is also a common response, particularly in children who can see their parents are struggling. Difficulties that surface a year or two later are very common. If you are unsure, a single conversation is a reasonable way to check.
No. Some children do not show difficulties until adolescence, when their understanding of the separation changes. Others struggle when something shifts a new partner, a move, a parent remarrying. Time passing does not mean the work has been missed.
That is a different kind of loss and needs a different approach. There is more detail on the page about divorce or the death of a parent.