Elissa Stieglitz, Ph.D.

Elissa Stieglitz, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist with more than 35 years of experience working with children, adolescents, adults, and families. She specializes in helping parents navigate the challenges of parenting at all stages of their children’s lives, drawing on her extensive training and experience in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and psychodynamic approaches.

Dr. Stieglitz brings a DBT-informed approach to parenting that emphasizes the balance between acceptance and change. She works with parents of young children, adolescents, and adult children, helping them better understand their children’s emotional and behavioral needs while developing practical strategies to respond effectively to challenging situations, strengthen communication, set appropriate boundaries, and build healthier family relationships. With adult children, this work may focus on navigating the transition from parenting a child to having a relationship with an adult, while balancing connection, support, independence, and appropriate boundaries.

Her work incorporates DBT skills such as mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness, adapted specifically to the realities of parenting and family life. She works collaboratively with parents to develop individualized strategies that are compassionate, realistic, and sustainable.

With extensive experience working with families from early childhood through adulthood and across a wide range of developmental, behavioral, academic, and emotional concerns, Dr. Stieglitz recognizes that effective parenting often requires both compassion and structure. She also has extensive experience supporting parents whose children have special educational needs and helping families navigate the special education system.

Dr. Stieglitz earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University in 1991. She subsequently completed two years of post-doctoral training in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at the Washington School of Psychiatry.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Stieglitz worked at the Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents (RICA), where she provided individual, family, and group psychotherapy to children and adolescents with complex academic, behavioral, and social-emotional needs. She served as a Clinical Team Leader and Clinical Supervisor, providing supervision and mentorship to psychologists, social workers, and expressive therapists, as well as participating actively in RICA’s Predoctoral Internship Program and training nearly 100 psychologists over the course of her career.

Dr. Stieglitz has extensive experience in DBT and played a key role in bringing DBT to RICA. She completed formal DBT training through the Linehan Institute Behavioral Tech in 2014 and subsequently integrated DBT theory and skills throughout her clinical work. She has led DBT skills groups for adolescents, parents, and multifamily groups and has provided training and consultation to other clinicians. She also received training in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) and has incorporated trauma-informed principles into her clinical work.

Dr. Stieglitz now brings this breadth of clinical experience to her private practice, where she focuses primarily on helping parents develop effective, compassionate approaches to parenting and strengthen their relationships with their children - whether their children are young, navigating adolescence, or are adults.

Outside of her work, Dr. Stieglitz enjoys cooking and entertaining, spending time with friends and family, hiking, Pilates, kickboxing, biking, walking, traveling, exploring art and culture, and reading to her grandchildren. She is married with four adult children and young grandchildren.

“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter