Mental Health Professionals - North Riverside, IL

"If you are a coparent (perhaps especially a father) do not seek care for your child from Karina. When my child was assumed to be in a "good place" and sessions were uneventful and often ended short, my daughter was in crisis. She began viciously lashing out at her sister. I raised this as a serious concern that I needed help with. "I ignore most of it because I don't know what to do, but I can't much longer." Then I never heard about it again. And there was no improvement in the situation. One month later my daughter opened up to me (ME) about her situation. She told me that, out of frustration for feeling like I was harping on her too much about her treatment of her sister, she'd told her mother and Karina that "dad and [my sister] can have their happy family, I'm done." She said she'd said it out of anger and that she didn't mean it. We talked about her anxiety and sadness, where it was coming from, what the deal was with her sister -- all of the things that could have been uncovered when I'd one month earlier said that Audrey was clearly struggling and we needed help. So once again, I contacted Karina. There is a crisis. You have absolutely no idea. This ship of "everything is fine" needs to be turned immediately. Karina's response? "What are you going to do about it?" At this point you might be thinking, yeah, that is not acceptable. But I haven't even gotten to the awful part yet. Because what had happened one month prior after I'd initially reached out was that Karina confronted my daughter about her behavior, and my daughter got defensive and lied, blaming me and her sister for the cruel way she was treating her sister. Then instead of ever raising a single concern with me about it, or ever checking back in again, Karina told my ex that I was emotionally abusing my daughter! Who also proceeded to never tell me about it. When Audrey went back to being a kind sister again, after her emotional difficulties were addressed months later, after I'd raised them and was ignored, after my daughter confided the actual truth about everything to me (she was being bullied at school!), Karina never went back to my ex to admit that her fantastically incorrect conclusion based on my daughter's obvious lies was not remotely correct. And I of course was still none the wiser. So what did this mean? Well, because we were in the middle of modifying the visitation schedule, this destroyed my relationship with my ex. It put my daughter actively in the middle, as my ex was telling my daughter that she shouldn't spend more time here because Karina says so, which was adding to my daughter's anxiety. Instead, Karina insisted that "for the well being of your daughter" me and my ex needed parenting therapy (we had been divorced for ten years) but refused to tell us why. The reason was the situation created 100% by Karina. Beyond unprofessional. This all came out after my ex FINALLY decided to talk about any of this with me. We promptly fired Karina. The damage she did was immeasurable. She had months to come clean with me and my ex. Instead she shoved a "safe harbor" agreement in our faces and refused to talk to us together, after loads of talking to us apart. Laziness, lack of accountability, the unwillingness to trust a parent in crisis begging for help with their amazing kid, and the blinding ethical lapses of weaponizing your child's social struggles, pitting parents against one another without their knowledge. If that's what you're looking for then Karina is for you. "