Letters From the Practice | August 2026

Letters From the Practice | August 2026

A letter from Dr. Serravalle

August has a particular quality to it. The mornings are still soft and unhurried, but there is a low hum underneath them now. Somewhere in the house there is a list. Supply lists, physicals, forms that need signatures, shoes that no longer fit. Even families who love the rhythm of the school year can feel the shift before it arrives. The body registers a transition long before the calendar does.

I think we underestimate how much energy re-entry asks of us. A new schedule is not only a logistical change. It is a nervous system recalibration. Children are bracing for new teachers, new expectations, and the quiet social work of figuring out where they fit. Parents are bracing too, often while pretending not to.

None of this means anything has gone wrong. Anticipation and unease can sit right next to excitement. What helps is not eliminating the stress of the season but making room for it. When we expect the transition to cost something, we stop reading every hard moment as a problem to fix and start reading it as a body doing what bodies do under change.

That is the thread running through this month's letter. Before we ask our kids, or ourselves, to launch into a new year, it helps to have somewhere soft to land first. A regulated adult, an unhurried evening, a few minutes of nothing before the questions begin. Regulation is not a luxury we earn after the to-do list is done. It is the ground the rest of it stands on.

So as August gets louder, I hope you will give yourself, and the people you love, a little room to land.

This month at Center for Balanced Living

The return to school shapes much of what is happening at the Center this month. Three new essays are arriving in our Make It Make Sense series, all written with parents in mind. It is also the season when questions about attention, learning, and school readiness tend to surface, and our evaluation work often begins with a parent noticing that something about how their child copes has changed. If that is you this fall, it helps to start the conversation early.

There is warm news to share as well. Brittany Heitmann is opening her schedule to new clients, and our wellness groups are forming for the fall. Groups offer something individual work cannot always provide, the steadying experience of realizing you are not the only one. More on all of it below.

Staff spotlight: Brittany Heitmann, LPCMH, NCC

This month we are glad to feature Brittany Heitmann, who holds a master's degree in Clinical Mental Health and Human Services. We share her news with some enthusiasm: Brittany is opening her schedule to new clients this fall.

Brittany practices within the framework that guides all of our clinical work. Care here is trauma-informed and relational, attentive to the nervous system and paced to the person rather than the protocol. For anyone who has felt hurried through past experiences of therapy, that orientation matters.

Reaching out for the first time, or returning after time away, asks something of a person. A good first conversation should feel less like being assessed and more like the beginning of a partnership. If you have been waiting for an opening that felt like the right fit, this is a good moment. You can ask about scheduling with Brittany through the contact page or the client portal.

Featured reading: Three essays for the new school year

This month's featured reading is not one essay but three, both arriving in Make It Make Sense in August and speaking directly to parents and teachers heading into a new year.

• ADHD Doesn't Skip Girls. It Hides in Them.
  • She was never the kid who got in trouble. She was the daydreamer, the sensitive one, the girl who worked twice as hard to keep up and called it normal. For a lot of women, ADHD was not missed because it wasn't there. It was missed because it never looked like the picture everyone was trained to see. This one is about how ADHD actually shows up in girls and women, why it so often gets read as anxiety instead, and why symptoms can shift with your cycle, after a baby, and again in perimenopause, right when you get told it is only stress.
• Why Your Kid Holds It Together All Day and Falls Apart at Home
  • Your child has a fine day at school, then walks through the door and comes apart over a snack or a sock. It feels like you get the worst of them, and it is easy to take it personally. You shouldn't. That collapse is not defiance and it is not a reflection of your parenting. It is a nervous system that spent all day holding itself together in a place that did not feel safe enough to let go, finally landing somewhere that does. Here is what is actually happening, and what helps.
• The Student Who Cannot Get Started Is Not Being Lazy
  • A student misses the deadline again, blurts out again, loses the folder again, and it is easy to read all of it as a kid who just will not try. Usually it is the opposite. What looks like laziness or defiance in a classroom is often executive function, the brain's system for planning, starting, and holding it together, running out of room under load. This one is for teachers: the difference between a skills problem and a character problem, why ADHD is one reason executive function breaks down but not the only one, and how what you notice in the room can be the first step toward a student finally getting the right help.

Watch for all three on the blog this month. Join our email list Make It Make Sense

Featured resource: A landing ritual for the return to school

The practice I want to offer this month is small enough to actually use on a hard day, which is the only kind of self-care worth recommending to a busy parent.

Call it a landing ritual. Before the after-school reunion, before the pickup line or the moment the bus doors open, take sixty seconds for your own nervous system. Two slow breaths where the exhale is longer than the inhale. A hand on your chest or on the steering wheel. A single sentence to yourself: the next hour may be bumpy, and I do not have to fix all of it.

The reasoning is not sentimental, it is physiological. Children co-regulate off the adults around them, which means your state is part of their environment. A parent who has downshifted even slightly is far better equipped to be the calm the evening borrows from. You are not bracing for the fallout. You are becoming the soft place to land that the day did not give them.

It will not make every evening smooth. It will change who you are when the evening is not.

Community spotlight: MUSA, and a new chapter

It feels right this month to spotlight MUSA, the writing home of our practice. MUSA is where the reflective work lives, the Make It Make Sense essays, these monthly letters, and the longer projects that grow out of clinical life. It rests on a simple belief: that language is part of healing, and that naming an experience precisely is often the first step toward carrying it differently.

That same belief sits behind my own book, The Stores We Told: The Dance Between a Codependent and a Compulsive Liar.  I wrote it about deception, memory, and the slow work of trusting yourself again after a relationship rewrites what you thought you knew. If these essays have ever put words to something you could not quite name, the book reaches for the same thing at greater length. You can find out more about it through the practice.

Community, in the end, is not only the groups we run or the events we hold. It is also the quieter fact of readers thinking alongside us, month after month.

Upcoming events

Wellness groups

• Parenting With Purpose is a monthly virtual support group designed for parents and caregivers who want practical strategies, professional guidance, and a supportive community of other parents. Each session focuses on a different parenting topic while providing opportunities for discussion, reflection, and skill-building that you can immediately apply at home. Facilitated by Brianna. Thursday at 5pm. Begins August 21. Register at https://balancedlivingde.com/pages/wellness-groups.

Workshops

• Nature Based EMDR: This three-hour workshop is approved for 3 CE Credits through EMDRIA and is for EMDR clinicians who already know how to do the work and want to think more carefully about when and how nature-informed elements belong inside a standard EMDR case. It is not a new protocol. The eight-phase, three-pronged structure does not change. Facilitated by Dr. Serravalle. August 21 12-3pm . Register at https://balancedlivingde.com/pages/workshopspage

Professional trainings

• Foundations of Trauma Therapy: This is a foundations intensive. It does not certify you in EMDR, IFS, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Somatic Experiencing, TIST, CPT, PE, or any other proprietary trauma model. It teaches you how to think across them. The curriculum is organized around clinical competencies and core trauma treatment questions, not around loyalty to a single modality. Across two days you will examine the history and ethics of trauma treatment, current diagnostic frameworks, the neurobiology of traumatic stress with honest attention to where the evidence ends, evidence-based protocols, somatic and parts-based and attachment work, complex trauma and dissociation, and the cultural and structural dimensions of trauma. The intensive distinguishes established evidence, emerging evidence, theoretical models, and clinical wisdom, and refuses to collapse them. Facilitated by Dr. Serravalle. September 18-19, 9-5pm. Register here: https://balancedlivingde.com/pages/professional-clinical-trainings

• EMDR Basic Training, coming this fall through CFBL Institute. Foundational training for licensed clinicians ready to begin integrating EMDR into their work, combining didactic learning, practicum, and consultation. Dates, format, and registration will be announced soon. Join the wait list: https://balancedlivingde.com/pages/courses-certification

A closing reflection

The season ahead will ask a great deal of everyone in your house, and it will arrive whether or not the forms are signed and the shoes are bought. You do not have to meet it perfectly. You only have to make a little room. Room for the hard evenings, for the slow re-entry, for the version of your child, and yourself, that needs to fall apart briefly before finding steadier ground.

Before we launch, we land. That is not a delay in the work. It is the work.

Stay connected

If any of this speaks to where you are right now, here are a few gentle ways to stay close:

• Watch for our two new essays this month, and pass them along to a parent who needs them.
• If your child's attention or coping has you wondering, reach out about an evaluation before the year gets busy.
• If you have been waiting for the right therapist, ask about scheduling with Brittany.

You can find all of it at balancedlivingde.com. Thank you for reading, and for being part of this community.

With warmth, Dr. Niki Serravalle Center for Balanced Living