Understanding Yourself Starts With Understanding Your Relationships
With a partner, a parent, a child, or a boss, most of us know how we want to show up. But under stress, old patterns can take over.
Those patterns often make more sense when we understand where they come from—the relationships and family systems that shaped us and continue to influence how we respond today.
Lasting change doesn’t begin with fixing yourself. It begins with understanding yourself.
Maddie Cox, LCSW
I began my career as a teacher before becoming a therapist. While I truly enjoyed teaching, my curiosity about people led me to continue my education. Since then, my work has taken me through schools, outpatient care, inpatient psychiatry, and private practice—working with adolescents, adults, couples, and families. Across those settings, I became increasingly interested in looking beyond symptoms to understand the larger relational patterns surrounding them.
That interest led me to Family Systems Theory and additional training at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family in Washington, D.C. This reinforced something I had already begun to see in my work: our responses rarely exist in isolation.
What I enjoy most is helping people see themselves differently. I’m less interested in asking, “What’s wrong?” and more interested in asking, “What’s happening here, and what makes this response make sense?”
Changing a pattern doesn’t require everyone involved to be in the room. Often, it begins with one person understanding their own part more clearly and creating more choice in how they respond.
I earned my Master’s in Social Work from The Catholic University of America and also serve on the Massachusetts General Hospital Leadership Council for Psychiatry.
How I Work
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Collaborative
You bring your experience; I bring clinical insight and perspective. Together, we decide where to focus.
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Curious
We slow things down and look beneath the surface, making room to understand your patterns before trying to change them.
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Human
There’s no expectation to have it all figured out. We can look honestly at what’s happening without judgment or the assumption that something needs to be fixed.