AJ Briggs

I'm AJ, a Licensed Clinical Therapist (LCSW) and Certified Perinatal Mental Health Specialist (PMH-C) working with high-achieving women navigating ADHD, anxiety, and reproductive mental health — from fertility and family planning through pregnancy, postpartum, and early parenthood. Many of my clients are professionals in demanding careers, women who received an ADHD diagnosis later in life, or new parents trying to hold both a career and a family without losing themselves in either. My approach combines cognitive and somatic work. I see clients virtually across Arizona, with limited in-person availability in Phoenix.

My approach is integrative and pace-aware. Most of the women I work with are skilled at thinking their way through hard things and have already done a lot of that on their own — so therapy with me isn't another exercise in analyzing what's wrong. It's about building a fuller relationship between what you understand cognitively and what your body is actually doing in response to your life.

I draw from cognitive behavioral therapy, somatic and nervous system-informed work, and trauma-focused approaches. With clients navigating reproductive mental health, I bring my PMH-C training and an understanding of how the perinatal period reshapes identity and capacity. With clients managing ADHD and anxiety, I focus on the patterns underneath the symptoms — not just the symptoms themselves.

Insight alone doesn't create change, and coping skills alone don't either. The work happens in the integration. My pace tends to be steady rather than urgent — we move at the speed your nervous system can metabolize, which is usually slower than your mind would prefer.

Sessions are 60 minutes and structured around what you actually need that week — not a fixed protocol. Early sessions focus on understanding your history, current stressors, and how your nervous system has learned to respond to demand. From there, we build practical tools you can use between sessions: ways to recognize early signs of overwhelm, regulate before reaching crisis, and make decisions from a steadier place rather than from urgency.

I work especially well with clients who have tried traditional talk therapy and found it useful but incomplete — who can articulate what's wrong but still feel stuck in the patterns. Combining cognitive insight with body-based awareness tends to move things that pure talk therapy can't.