​Amanda is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and a mother of 4, plus 2 children from a blended partnership.  She is currently working towards the completion of her doctoral degree in counseling education and supervision. Amanda specializes in working with couples and individuals who want to strengthen their lives and relationships through positive communication, conflict management, and improvement in intimacy as well as self-care, so they are able to continue to care for others.

 

Using a non-judgmental, strength-based approach, Amanda guides couples in finding solutions to problems, while also maintaining a safe and supportive space where couples can communicate safely and openly about the fears that paralyze them, such as fear of loss, disappointment, rejection, and loss of self.

 

Neurodiverse Couples

Communication is important in every relationship, and it can be particularly challenging for a neurodiverse couple. Amanda believes that it is vital to identify solid communication strategies between partners, using specific techniques for handling relationship troubles, whether perpetual or solvable. 

 

These techniques encourage the understanding that emotions are important, there is no absolute reality, only two subjective ones, acceptance is crucial, and a development of fondness and admiration within the relationship. Amanda encourages couples to celebrate the small steps towards a larger goal and helps keep focus on what the couple can do to set themselves up to thrive. 

 

Parenting Neurodiverse Children

Amanda has personal experience as a mother of a neurodivergent 13 year old, working through the white waters of concern for her child’s behavior and development, receiving the diagnosis of neurodiversity, and wondering what it means to parent a child who is neurodiverse. 

 

Parenting neurodivergent children can be exponentially intense.  Amanda teaches parents positive parenting skills that encourage the use of “Why?” to address the child’s behavior, focusing on an understanding of the purpose that behavior serves the child and what they are trying to tell you.  Allowing the behavior to inform what needs to be put into place ahead of time to help the child manage the particular challenge, and also ensuring that consequences are related to the behavior/issue as a last resort to addressing behavior. 

 

Amanda encourages parents to catch their child’s positive behaviors whenever possible and to name specifically what they see so as to encourage the positive behavior to reoccur.

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Other areas of focus (in addition to Neurodiversity):

• Addiction

• Affair Recovery

• Major Life Transition Support, co-parenting, blended families, separation/divorce

• Parent Coaching

• Sex Therapy​

 

Clients: 

couples and families

 

Modalities:

• Coaching

• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

• Gottman Method

• Internal Family Systems (IFS)

• Solution Focused Brief (SFBT)

• Strength-Based

• Structural Family Therapy

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License:

Registered Associate, MFTA #126006

Supervised by Dr. Harry Motro, LMFT #53452

Employed by New Path Couples Therapy Inc.

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Contact:

abuckman.therapy@gmail.com

Phone: (415) 805-6759

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