Margaret Mitchell, Ph.D. Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Evidence Based Treatments for Children & Adolescents
Services & Areas of Specialty
Margaret specializes in working with children and teens with anxiety disorders, depression, and emotion regulation challenges. Specific areas of interest include OCD, phobias, school refusal, encopresis, tics, trichotillomania, and body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRB).
Additionally, Margaret is a co-founder of Mindful-Vision-Performance (MVP) – The Mental Game, a group of clinicians providing mental training to athletes, helping them reach their full potential both in sports and in life. This may include helping clients with performance anxiety, burn out and over-training, resiliency following Injury, mental preparation for peak performance, and reconnecting with the joy of their sport.
Expertise & Training
Margaret earned her bachelor’s degree at Brown University and her doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Seattle Pacific University. Her clinical residency was completed at the Medical Center at the University of Arizona. She returned to Seattle for a two year postdoctoral fellowship at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital.
Personal
Margaret was born and raised in Seattle, Washington and is a mother of two. The love of sport and fitness continues to inspire involvement in women’s basketball city leagues, beach volleyball, weight training, swimming, cycling and ultimate frisbee. Other interests include photography, acting, planning inventive birthday parties, and fostering children's joy, growth and mastery.
Treatments that Work
Evidence-Based Treatment within a Safe and Caring Relationship
The Relationship.
It doesn’t matter how good the treatment is, if you can’t get your child to come to therapy. Across treatments, the therapeutic alliance is essential to positive outcomes. Margaret’s ability to connect and form a relationship with each child/teen is rooted in teamwork, understanding, and targeting the change that is important to them.
Goal Identification and Locking in to Motivation.
In order to motivate clients to do the hard work needed for behavioral change, they need to know why they are doing it. What’s in it for them? Goal assessment is critical to tap into client motivation. It also is important to understand the ways in which client and parent goals may differ. To foster motivation, external rewards may be used to reinforce children and teens for doing therapy ‘homework’ between sessions, such as tracking behaviors and thoughts or practicing more effective behaviors in the real world.
Thorough Assessment.
The most critical step in creating change for kids is thorough assessment and understanding of the problem. There are several tools that are used to gain insight into the function of behaviors in different contexts. These include a thorough history of the presenting problem, baseline measures to assess severity of symptoms and level of distress, and Behavior Chain Analysis (BCA) to understand common cues that lead to the problem behavior and outcomes that may be maintaining the unwanted behavior. It also is important to assess the function of the behavior and in what contexts they occur (or don’t occur). Consultation with the child’s school and other service providers is common toward this end.
Case Conceptualization.
A case conceptualization outlines the key variables in the child’s history, patterns of behaviors, diagnoses and interventions. For those teens 13 years of age and older, permission will be needed to share any information regarding treatment and progress toward goals.
Measuring Progress.
At regular intervals, clients will complete self-report forms to gauge progress toward goals and levels of distress.
Generalization of Skills.
In order to generalize skills to the real world, Margaret works in many real world contexts. This includes, in-home visits for exposure therapy or parent coaching, classroom observations, and texting and phone support between sessions.
Mindful-Vision-Performance (MVP) -The Mental Game
Margaret is a co-founder of Mindful-Vision-Performance (MVP) – The Mental Game, a group of clinicians providing mental training to youth athletes to help them reach their full potential both in sports and in life. This may include helping clients with performance anxiety, burn out and over-training, resiliency following Injury, perfectionism and fears of failure, sport-life balance and identity, mental preparation for peak performance, and reconnecting with the joy of sport. https://www.mvpmentalgame.com/