Therapy for Young Adults in Maryland and Virginia
With Bradford Wolf, LCSW
There is a version of this you were expecting, and it is not the one you got.
The job is fine and does not resemble what you trained for. The apartment costs more than it should and you are not sure how long you are staying. People you used to see weekly are now people you text. And somewhere in there you started to suspect that everyone else received a set of instructions that never reached you.
Therapy for young adults is individual therapy for people in their twenties and thirties, working on what happens when the career, the money, the relationships, and the sense of who you are are all unsettled at the same time.
I am Bradford Wolf, a licensed clinical social worker in Rockville, Maryland. I work with adults in person and by video across Maryland and Virginia, as part of my individual therapy practice.
This page covers what this stage actually does to people, what therapy involves if you have never done it, what it costs, and what shows up if you are still on a parent's insurance.
Worth establishing early, because most of what you will find when you search for this is not.
I work with adults only. I do not see teenagers, I do not run family sessions, and I do not report to anyone on how you are doing. If you are over eighteen you are the client, and you are the only client.
That holds regardless of who is paying. Nobody is being updated. Not a parent, not a partner, not anyone.
If you are here because a parent suggested it, that is a completely reasonable way to arrive and it does not change any of the above. Plenty of good ideas come from other people. The work is still yours.
This page is for you, not your parents
You are not behind
The comparison is constant and it runs in one direction.
You see the promotions, the engagements, the apartments, the trips. You do not see the six weeks somebody spent not answering messages, or the job that is quietly going badly, or the relationship that looks settled and is not. The evidence you are working from is real, and it is also filtered in a way that makes your own situation look uniquely bad.
There is a number worth knowing here. In 2021, the National Institute of Mental Health found that adults aged 18 to 25 had the highest rate of major depressive episode of any adult age group.
That is not a claim that everyone you know is secretly miserable. It is narrower and more useful than that: struggling at this stage is common enough to be unremarkable, which means it is not evidence of anything about you in particular. And it means you do not need to justify it before you deal with it.
If you have never done this before
A lot of people reading this have not, so here is what it actually involves.
Fifty minutes, usually weekly at the start. You talk, I ask questions, and we work out what is going on. There is no couch. I am not writing down judgments about you. You do not need to arrive with a diagnosis, a clear goal, or a sense of what you want to work on, and if you did have all that you probably would not need to come.
The worry I hear most from people your age is not that they will be judged. It is some version of "I will run out of things to say" or "my problem is not serious enough to be taking up a professional's time."
On the first: you will not. On the second: the threshold you are imagining is much higher than the real one. People come in about things that sound small said out loud, and they are usually not small once you look at them.
I have been doing this work for over fifteen years. I am not going to pretend to be in my twenties or that I know what your particular version of this is like from the inside. What I have is having sat with a lot of people through this stage and a reasonable sense of what helps. My background has the rest.
If that sounds workable, you can book a free 15-minute call.
If you are on your parents' insurance
This stops more people than anything else on this page, and almost nobody addresses it, so here is the straight version.
If you are under twenty-six and on a parent's plan, they are the policyholder. When a claim gets submitted, the explanation of benefits generally goes to the policyholder. Depending on the plan, that document can show that a service was provided, and sometimes what kind.
I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the sort of thing that gets overstated. It varies. Some insurers send more detail than others, some states have confidentiality protections for adult dependents, and a number of plans let you request that communications go to you directly. I cannot tell you what your specific plan does, and neither can anyone else without looking at it. Call the member services number on the card and ask what appears on an explanation of benefits and who receives it. It is a normal question and they answer it regularly.
What I can tell you is the mechanical difference on my end. If you pay directly, no claim is submitted. No claim means no explanation of benefits, which means nothing about this is sent to anybody.
That is a real consideration and it is not the only one. For plenty of people the in-network route is still the right call, and the conversation with a parent about it is frequently less difficult than it looks from here. But you should get to decide that with accurate information rather than get stuck on it.
What it costs
A 50-minute session is $225. I am out of network, so you pay at the session, I give you a superbill, and you can submit it for reimbursement if you have out-of-network benefits.
I am not going to dress that up. On a first or second salary, $225 a week is a lot of money, and you can do that arithmetic faster than I can distract you from it.
So the honest position: for a good number of people at this stage, using your in-network benefits is the better decision. Therapy you can sustain for a year beats therapy you can sustain for six weeks, and if the choice is between seeing someone in network and seeing nobody, see someone in network. I would rather say that than have you start here and stop in February.
What paying directly gets you is what I described above: no claim, no diagnosis on a record, and a pace set between the two of us rather than by what a plan authorizes. Whether that is worth the difference depends on your situation, and it is a legitimate answer either way.
One practical note that changes the math: a lot of people start weekly and move to every other week once things are steadier. That is a normal course of treatment rather than a discount, but it does mean the monthly cost is not fixed forever.
What reimbursement depends on covers the mechanics, and you can book the free 15-minute consultation to work through it before committing to anything.
In person in Rockville, online across Maryland and Virginia
I see clients at 27 Wood Ln in Rockville, MD 20850, and by video anywhere in Maryland or Virginia.
One thing that catches people in this area: the rule is about where you are physically sitting during the session, not where you work. If you live in Silver Spring or Arlington and commute into the District, that is fine. If you are taking the session from your desk in DC, that is not, and it is a licensing rule rather than a preference of mine.
Video also solves two things that come up a lot at this stage. If you move within Maryland or Virginia, the work continues rather than restarting with somebody new. And if your living situation does not include a room with a door, people take sessions from their car more often than you would think. That is completely normal and I am not going to comment on it. Online therapy in Maryland and online therapy in Virginia cover how it runs.
If what you are dealing with has a name
You may already have a fairly good idea what this is. If so, these pages go into more depth than this one does.
If it is a mind that will not stop and a body that is already braced, start with anxiety.
If it is flatness and weight rather than pressure, and it has spread into things you used to enjoy, look at depression.
If it is specifically the job that has emptied you out, read burnout.
If there was one clear event and things were reasonably steady before it, life transitions is the closer fit.
If something has taken up more room than you meant to give it and stopping has not worked, compulsive behavior covers that.
And if you are a man who would rather read this framed more directly, therapy for men does that.
Common questions
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If you pay directly, no claim is submitted and nothing is sent to anyone. If you use a parent's insurance, an explanation of benefits generally goes to the policyholder, and what it shows varies by plan and by state. Call your insurer and ask what appears on it and who receives it before you decide.
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No. I see adults only, eighteen and over. If you are looking for a therapist for someone younger, there are practices in this area that specialize in that and I am happy to point you toward one.
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Fifty minutes of talking about what is going on. I ask what brought you in, what you have already tried, and what you would want to be different. You do not need to prepare anything or have your thoughts organized. Most people arrive with a mess and sorting the mess is the work.
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Almost certainly. The bar people imagine is much higher than the actual one. You do not need a diagnosis, a crisis, or a reason that sounds impressive. Something being off and staying off is a complete reason to come in.
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$225 for a 50-minute session, out of network. That is a genuine amount of money on an early-career salary, and for some people the right answer is to use in-network benefits instead. If cost is the deciding factor, say so on the call and I will tell you honestly what I think.
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It depends on what you are working on and how much is going on underneath it. Some people come for a few months around something specific and some stay longer. I will not give you a session count, because anyone offering one before meeting you is guessing.
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If you are in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time. My practice is not an emergency service and I am not reachable between sessions for crises, which is worth knowing before you start.
Starting therapy in your twenties or thirties
This stage is harder than it looks from outside it, and considerably harder than it looked from where you were at nineteen. That is not a character test you are failing.
The consultation is fifteen minutes, it costs nothing, and it is a reasonable place to ask the practical questions as well as the other ones. If my read is that in-network care makes more sense for you, I will say so. I do not currently have a waitlist.
Book the free 15-minute consultation, or read more about individual therapy with me.
Sources
National Institute of Mental Health, "Major Depression," NIMH Statistics. Underlying data: SAMHSA 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/major-depression