Margaret Christopher, Ph.D, MPH, LCSW, ACSW

I'm a behavioral health provider with 45 years experience working with children, youth and families, along with individual family members of all ages who prefer to be seen individually.

Using a trauma-informed, strengths-based, resiliency-focused, evidence-based approach to therapy, I'm committed to helping individuals and families become the best that they can be, to enjoy life, to constructively solve problems, and to help to make the world a little better place just because they are a part of it. We partner to fully assess the situation that brings you to therapy and then develop and carry out an intervention plan that helps you move move through and beyond whatever tunnel of trauma you are in so that you can discover the incredible strength that comes from effectively processing and managing it and move forward with your life.

Every individual and every family is unique and different with its own special set of strengths and weaknesses. We want to maximize and further develop the strengths while minimizing the weaknesses. Although it is important to know enough about the past to understand how a person or family has developed so far, we also want to focus on the present and help you decide how to write the next chapter in your life story.

With children and adolescents in particular, enrichment and psychoeducation related to executive functioning skills are included in the intervention plans we develop and carry out. In addition to therapy, we offer our individualized LEAP-Forward Program for children and youth, our couples-in-conflict program for couples and partners, our emotional survival program for those going through unwanted family estrangement, separation and divorce, our conflict resolution and mediation program, our reunification program, our recovery from domestic violence and victimization program and an annual betrayal trauma workshop. In addition, we are a platform for grant-writing and new program development so that our communities, organizations, groups, families and individuals can better cope with the confusion and pandemic-related traumas that many of us have experienced in the past few years.

Although we are still working through an easy-to-access, HIPPA-compliant confidential platform, we plan to reopen our in-person offices in the near future so that people will have more choice about how to access us. We currently have two offices in the Southwestern Pennsylvania area and can do some types of virtually work especially coaching and consulting, at a national level.