Therapy, Coaching & Psychological Services for Milwaukee's North Shore
Psychological care for Shorewood, Whitefish Bay, Glendale, Fox Point, Bayside, River Hills, and surrounding communities.
Neuma Psychological Services provides psychotherapy, coaching, and psychological consultation for individuals, couples, families, and organizations throughout Milwaukee's North Shore.
Our office is located in Glendale, making in-person care convenient for residents of Shorewood, Whitefish Bay, Fox Point, Bayside, River Hills, and Glendale itself. We also provide telehealth psychotherapy throughout Wisconsin and virtual coaching more broadly for people who prefer the flexibility of meeting from home or work.
We are a small practice founded by Zach and Alicia Meyer. We share a relational and psychodynamic approach to psychological health while bringing different areas of training, experience, and interest to our work.
We are also interested in something larger than symptom reduction. Therapy sometimes begins because anxiety, depression, OCD, trauma, relationship difficulties, or another concern is causing genuine suffering. But psychological health can also involve greater self-understanding, healthier relationships, stronger boundaries, increased discernment, creativity, connection, and a clearer sense of what makes a life meaningful.
Our goal is not simply to help people feel less bad.
We want to help people live well.
Therapy for Teens & Adolescents on the North Shore
Adolescence is a complicated developmental period even when things appear to be going reasonably well.
Young people are managing increasing academic expectations, complicated social environments, changing relationships with parents, questions of identity and belonging, and the gradual expectation that they take greater responsibility for lives that adults have largely structured for them until now.
Zach works extensively with adolescents and teenagers, including students from North Shore schools such as Shorewood High School, Whitefish Bay High School, and Nicolet High School.
Some teenagers come to therapy because something is clearly wrong. Anxiety has become overwhelming, ADHD is interfering with school, motivation has collapsed, friendships have become painful, family conflict is escalating, or depression or self-harm has become a concern.
Others are functioning quite well from the outside while struggling internally with perfectionism, social anxiety, confidence, identity, pressure to achieve, or the sense that everyone else seems to be managing adolescence more naturally than they are.
Therapy can address the immediate difficulty while also helping young people understand themselves more deeply and develop the internal resources they will increasingly need as they move toward adulthood.
EXPLORE THERAPY FOR TEENS & ADOLESCENTS
College Students & Young Adults
The developmental questions that begin during adolescence become even more consequential during college and young adulthood.
Students begin making decisions about education, vocation, relationships, identity, money, values, and where and how they want to live. At the same time, much of the external structure that organized life in high school disappears.
For some young adults, that transition exposes difficulties with ADHD, motivation, organization, anxiety, perfectionism, OCD, depression, relationships, or social confidence. Others are doing reasonably well but feel surprisingly uncertain about what they want from the opportunities available to them.
Zach has spent much of his professional life working with adolescents, college students, and emerging adults. He is particularly interested in helping young people move from lives organized primarily around external expectations toward a more personally owned sense of identity, direction, and responsibility.
Therapy can help address what is causing distress now while remaining interested in the larger developmental question: what kind of adult is this person becoming?
EXPLORE THERAPY FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS & YOUNG ADULTS
Therapy for Adults
Adults seek therapy for reasons ranging from clearly defined mental health concerns to the much harder-to-name experience of realizing that something about life is no longer working particularly well.
Both Zach and Alicia work with adults experiencing anxiety, OCD, depression, questions of identity, religious trauma, relationship difficulties, and significant life transitions. We share a relational and psychodynamic perspective, which means we are interested not only in reducing symptoms but in understanding how relationships and earlier experiences have shaped the patterns someone brings into the present.
Our individual areas of focus also differ.
Zach works particularly with ADHD, emotional regulation, perfectionism, creativity, identity, and the challenges that accompany transitions through young and middle adulthood. He is trained in Internal Family Systems and frequently incorporates IFS and other parts-oriented approaches into his work.
Alicia works particularly with trauma, codependency, boundaries, relational patterns, identity, and the ways earlier relationships continue influencing present life. She is a certified EMDR therapist and brings a strong family-systems perspective to her clinical work.
Sometimes one clinician's expertise will make the choice obvious. When either of us could be a good fit, therapeutic style and personality may matter just as much.
Couples & Intergenerational Family Therapy
Relationships are among the most important sources of meaning in our lives and some of the places where our most persistent psychological patterns become visible.
Both Zach and Alicia provide couples therapy.
Our work with couples goes beyond teaching communication techniques. We want to understand what happens between two people when the relationship becomes emotionally charged: how one person's attempt to be understood may make the other feel criticized, how a need for space can be experienced as rejection, or how old injuries can become embedded in present disagreements.
Couples therapy can help partners communicate more effectively, understand themselves and one another more deeply, express needs more clearly, establish healthier boundaries, and develop a relationship capable of holding both connection and difference.
Alicia also specializes in intergenerational family therapy with adult family members. This work may involve parents and adult children, adult siblings, or other generations trying to address longstanding conflict, estrangement, caregiving, changing family roles, boundaries, or relationships that have become stuck.
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Coaching for North Shore Residents
Not every important psychological question requires psychotherapy.
People also seek help because they are making consequential decisions, entering a new stage of life, struggling to turn intentions into action, reconsidering what they want from work or relationships, or wanting to become more intentional about how they live.
Coaching allows us to bring substantial psychological training and professional experience to those questions without unnecessarily treating ordinary human development as pathology.
Both Zach and Alicia provide coaching, with different but complementary areas of emphasis.
Student & Young Adult Coaching with Zach
For students and young adults, coaching can provide support around concerns that are psychologically important without necessarily representing a mental health disorder.
Zach works with students around motivation, focus, study habits, independence, healthy routines, decision-making, vocational discernment, relationships, boundaries, and the transition into adult responsibilities.
College readiness is a particular area of interest. Leaving home requires young people to manage an extraordinary number of responsibilities at approximately the same time: academics, schedules, food, sleep, money, laundry, friendships, self-care, decision-making, and the emotional experience of living more independently.
Students who were highly successful within the structure of North Shore schools may discover that success feels surprisingly different when much of that external structure disappears.
Coaching can help with the practical skills involved in independence while also addressing the larger developmental task of learning how to take increasing ownership of a life.
Zach also provides coaching for writers, musicians, performers, and other creative people around creative blocks, burnout, perfectionism, self-doubt, performance anxiety, developing a creative voice, and establishing a sustainable relationship with creative work.
[ EXPLORE STUDENT & YOUNG ADULT COACHING ]
[ EXPLORE COLLEGE READINESS COACHING ]
[ EXPLORE CREATIVE COACHING ]
Coaching with Alicia
Alicia's coaching work centers on relationships, systems, boundaries, identity, and the development of greater agency within the many roles people occupy.
This can be particularly valuable for women navigating the complicated intersection of work, relationships, family, caregiving, leadership, and their own ambitions.
Someone may be highly capable and successful while finding it difficult to establish boundaries, tolerate another person's disappointment, ask directly for what she needs, or distinguish what she genuinely wants from what she has become accustomed to providing for everyone around her.
Workplace questions can be especially fertile ground for this kind of coaching. Women may find themselves considering how they use authority, respond to conflict, advocate for themselves, navigate organizational systems, or pursue professional ambition without reproducing expectations about responsibility and self-sacrifice that no longer serve them.
Alicia's systems perspective allows these questions to be considered in context. Families, workplaces, relationships, churches, and communities all communicate expectations about who we are supposed to be. Greater self-understanding can create more freedom to decide which of those expectations we actually want to carry.
The aim is not simply increased productivity or professional success. It is a more empowered and intentional way of inhabiting relationships, work, and one's own life.
Because coaching is distinct from psychotherapy, this work is not limited geographically to Wisconsin.
[ EXPLORE COACHING ]
[ MEET ALICIA ]
Parent Coaching
Parents remain enormously important during adolescence and young adulthood.
Their role simply becomes more complicated.
A teenager may be struggling with motivation, anxiety, ADHD, friendships, school performance, emotional regulation, or increasing independence. A college student may appear to be making poor decisions or failing to manage responsibilities their parents assumed they were ready to handle.
Parents often find themselves asking some version of the same question: How much should I help?
Too little support can leave a young person overwhelmed. Too much can interfere with the development of independence, problem-solving, and confidence that parents ultimately want their children to acquire.
Parent coaching provides a place to think through these situations with someone who understands adolescent and young-adult development.
Sometimes the most effective psychological intervention does not begin by asking how to change the child. It begins by helping the adults around that child understand what may be happening and respond differently.
[ CONTACT NEUMA ABOUT PARENT COACHING ]
Psychological Consultation for North Shore Organizations
The North Shore is home to schools, churches, businesses, nonprofits, arts organizations, and other institutions whose work depends fundamentally upon people and relationships.
Neuma provides psychological consultation to organizations that want deeper expertise around those human dimensions of their work.
Zach's consultation is particularly focused on organizations serving adolescents, college students, emerging adults, and creative communities. His work can include youth mental health, staff training, difficult-case consultation, crisis response, psychologically informed policy and programming, performance anxiety, and helping staff better understand the developmental and psychological needs of the people they serve.
Alicia's consultation focuses particularly on organizational systems, relational health, workplace dynamics, leadership, boundaries, and conflict resolution. She has previous experience consulting with churches and parachurch organizations around organizational structure, relationships, and conflict and is particularly interested in working with organizations and programs that support and empower women.
These perspectives are different but complementary. A school may need help understanding the psychological needs of its students while also confronting difficult dynamics among the adults responsible for serving them. A church may be dealing simultaneously with individual wellbeing, leadership, organizational structure, conflict, and community relationships.
Some projects are best served by Zach.
Some are best served by Alicia.
Others benefit from both.
EXPLORE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSULTATION
A Psychological Practice Located on the North Shore
For North Shore residents, Neuma is not simply a Milwaukee-area practice that happens to be reasonably close.
Our office is in Glendale, within the North Shore itself.
That makes in-person therapy and coaching readily accessible from Shorewood, Whitefish Bay, Fox Point, Bayside, River Hills, Glendale, and neighboring communities.
For people who prefer telehealth, psychotherapy is also available virtually throughout Wisconsin where our licenses permit us to practice. Many clients choose virtual appointments even when they live nearby because eliminating the commute makes care easier to integrate into work, school, parenting, and family life.
Coaching offers still greater geographic flexibility because it is not governed by psychotherapy licensure in the same way.
A Small Practice With Two Distinct Clinicians
Neuma is intentionally small.
When you contact our practice, you are choosing between two clinicians who know one another's work well and share a broad philosophy of psychological health while bringing genuinely different training, personalities, and areas of expertise.
We think those differences are valuable.
Someone seeking therapy for a teenager will naturally be directed toward Zach. Someone specifically looking for EMDR or intergenerational family therapy will naturally be directed toward Alicia. Many adults and couples could work well with either clinician, and coaching or consultation may similarly draw upon one or both of us depending upon what the work requires.
You do not need to determine all of that before contacting us.
Tell us what is happening and what you hope might be different.
We can help determine what kind of support makes sense and who is most likely to be a good fit.