Rachel Starck
LPC
Counselor/Therapist
Portland, USA
Answers questions in Adolescent Issues · Anxiety · Co-Occurring Disorders
About Rachel Starck
I graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 1997 with my Masters in Counseling Psychology. Since then I have worked as a therapist in various residential treatment agencies with adjudicated youth, youth in state custody, as well as their families. In 2005 I left agencies to focus on building my practice, after becoming a parent myself. I feel especially drawn to help working mothers manage their juggling act more effectively and without loosing sight of themselves.
What I do
I run my private practice out of the wellness center that I also manage (The North Portland Growth Place). I work with adults, adolescents and children in the areas of depression, anxiety, life transition, relationships and parenting. I specialize in coaching working mothers to improve their stress management skills and move from overwhelm to balance and joy!
My story
I graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 1997 with my Masters in Counseling Psychology. Since then I have worked as a therapist in various residential treatment agencies with adjudicated youth, youth in state custody, as well as their families. In 2005 I left agencies to focus on building my practice, after becoming a parent myself. I feel especially drawn to help working mothers manage their juggling act more effectively and without loosing sight of themselves.
Treatment Offered
Specialties
Therapy approaches
Patient population
Modalities
Answered Questions(20)
Postpartum Blues
My wife just gave birth to our daughter 6 days ago. She seems really depressed to me and she is crying a lot. I know this is kind of normal to be depressed after childbirth. She does not want to talk to anybody about what she is going through and she asked me not to tell my parents about it or anyone else. I do not know if I am supposed to be doing something more to help her or if I just need to give her some space and time to get through this on her own. This is our first child so I have no experience. Also, I am already back at work so I can’t be around to help as much as I want to. But since I am the only one working now, we don’t have much a choice about that.
Read answer →Seductive Teen-Daughter
I am in a very difficult situation. My 14 year old daughter is flirting heavily with my new boyfriend and wearing inappropriate clothing around the house when he is over. She denies doing it but it is very awkward for him and for me. I think that she does it to get back at me for disciplining her for recent problems she has had like shoplifting and drinking in the park with her friends. I find it disgusting of course that she acts like this but I do not know how upset or worried I should be. Is this normal behavior for a girl her age.
Read answer →New Parent Woes
We are a lesbian couple that has just adopted a beautiful baby girl. My partner and I have been together for 6 years and we both wanted this and worked very hard to get everything lined up and then after so many failures it all just happened and 3 months ago we brought Gloria home with us from the hospital. My partner is a lawyer and makes much more money than I do so we had planned that she would work and that I would stay home with the baby. I had not expected it to be as much work as it is but I am not whining about it because I am sure most new moms get surprised by this. But I am really disappointed that my parter is so disinterested in doing anything with the baby. She won't admit it but I think she is staying even later at the office now so she won't have to do anything with Gloria at all. I guess I always took care of her since she was so busy and now I just don't have time to do that anymore. This seems like an impossible question but how can I make her love this baby? If it hasn't happened already is it going to ever happen? I don't know how she can be so blind and I am starting to think she's more selfish than I ever knew. I am also so tired I can't think straight and even though she makes or money it would be nice to have a little more help and support. She was so excited before and she was the one that really made the adoption happen but now that it has it is like she wished it hadn't (though she won't admit that) and I wasn't sure and she convinced me and now I am totally won over forever with this baby girl. What do I do to make her want to be a mom, or is that an impossible thing to even try for? I try to talk to her about this but we always end up fighting (we used to be able to talk).
Read answer →Support vs Enabling
I have a 22 year old son who is a recovering Heroine/Blues (synthetic form of heroine?) addict. He was diagnosed with clinical depression in adolesence, was in juvenile detention from 14 to 17 and most recently in jail for the past 7 months for fraud ( he stole checks from his father.) My ex husband and my daughter (we are close) refuse to have contact with him at this point and I am the only family member he has contact with. He is living in a halfway house in the same town and attending meetings as required. I know he is having a difficult time as it is a horrible place with many homeless men living there. I am struggling with letting him stay with me for a defined period of time with a written agreement and requirements to offer support for him. I belive he has "hit bottom" this last time but not sure if I can know that for sure. He became a father 7 months ago and they live in another state. I would like to give him the support he needs to be successful but don"t want to fall back into the same patterns. I have not been the "Tough Love" one in the family ...
Read answer →Out of Control Teenage Son
I can't control my 15 year old son and I don't know what do. He won't come home some nights and he doesn't answer my phone calls and then he is vague about where he has been. I ground him and he just doesn't come home again. I take away all his privileges and he doesn't care, he just goes out. I stop his allowance and he always seems to have lot of money that I don't know where he gets. He won't talk to me and the only thing I can think to do is the thing I never want to do which is kick him out of the house! How do I make this situation better. My wife and I are at the end of our rope and we just do not know what to do.
Read answer →Forcing hope?
My dad's been drinking for 50 years and now the doctor says if he doesn’t stop he is going to die. He says he's too old to change now and that it is hopeless? I can understand how hard it must be to try to change after so long but I do not want to believe that there is no hope and that he should just give up. What do I need to do to get him to feel like there is some hope?
Read answer →Clary Sage for Depression?
Do you know if aromatherapy can be a treatment for depression? A colleague at work is very into alternative health and when I confided in her about my dysthymia she said that clary sage in aromatherapy was a very effective treatment without any negative side effects. Is this factual? I am a bit skeptical...
Read answer →Fetal drug exposure
My daughter is 11 months old and she seems OK. Her mom did meth, crack, pills, alcohol and weed while she was pregnant. She did it mostly in the first few months and then she got her act together a bit but she still had some relapses all the way through. How long will I have to wait before I can know whether or not the drugs her mom did have harmed her or not?
Read answer →2 Months Sober
My ex girlfriend had a drinking problem and it eventually got so bad that I ended the relationship because I couldn't deal with the constant problems anymore, though I still did and do love her. Now she has been going to AA and she is 2 months sober and she is asking me to take her back. For her 2 months is a very big deal and I am proud of her. Is 2 months of sober time a significant enough amount that it indicates that she is likely going to be able to keep off the drinking?
Read answer →Postpartum mania?
Is there such a thing as post partum mania or post partum manic depression? My wife just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl last week and we are home and everything is good but my wife is behaving really strangely. Like for the last couple of days she is humming with energy and doesn’t seem to need sleep and can’t stop talking. Her ideas are just bubbling out and they aren’t really making a lot of sense. I had a friend with bipolar who killed himself when I was a teenager and this is how he used to act when he was manic. I am worried but she does seem to be very happy so I don’t know if I need to be concerned or not. Do I?
Read answer →My son is stuck!
My son lives at home. He dropped out of college last year and he works an overnight gas station job and otherwise sleeps and sits at home playing video games and I think smoking a lot of pot. I am so frustrated with his apathy because he is a very smart guy he could do anything but seems to be choosing to just do nothing. My wife says it’s just a phase he is going through and that eventually he will get bored with this life and decide for himself to move on to something better and that if we try to force the issue before he’s ready it will just end up like the last time he failed out of college. I am starting to worry that he will never choose to do anything more than he is doing right now unless we force the issue. How do I make someone who doesn’t want to care about the future care about the future? Kicking him out of the house is totally not an option from my wife’s perspective.
Read answer →Teens on Facebook
My 13 year old daughter forgot to log out of her facebook account and when I got on the computer I couldn’t help myself but take a look. I know it was an invasion of her privacy but I just did it anyway. I know that 13 year olds are way too grown up these days but I was shocked at the stuff these kids were talking about, about marijuana and drinking and sex and posting provocative pictures. My daughter had posted some shots of herself in her bedroom that were obviously supposed to be sexy shots of her in her underwear. It is very hard to see this. I have not told her that I snooped through her account but I am very worried about this. Is this normal behavior for a 13 year old girl? What should I do about this?
Read answer →Drug-dealing adult son
My son is dealing drugs. He is 24 and he is a drug addict and I know now that he is supporting himself by dealing drugs. I have been wondering where he gets his money and I did not want to think the worst of him but his sisters finally told me the truth about what I already knew was going on. He is addicted to meth and to crack and he deals to feed his habit. I have tried on so many occasions to get him to stop using the drugs that he has been using since he dropped out of high school in his Junior year. He has ADHD and he could never really fit into the school system, and I think the ADHD has made it hard for him to have much success anywhere else in his life, which is part of why he uses drugs. I am scared that he is going to die. He is just a sweet kid below all the drugs and if he doesn’t OD someone is going to pull a gun or a knife on him and kill him. I am at the end of my wits and I am seriously considering calling the police on him. I have no influence to help him but on the other hand I am worried about what a felony record might do to him. He has never been to jail before but once he is a felon he is a felon for life. Is there any way I can get the police involved without having them charge him with a serious crime. I think if he could get scared enough about what might happen to him he might be more able to think about getting some help for his addictions.
Read answer →Postpartum blues
I am going through postpartum depression 4 weeks after the birth of my first son. My aunt has recommended that I take fish oil tablets because she says they are helpful for postpartum depression. She gave me some to try but I stopped yesterday after only a day or so because they were giving me the worst fish gas burps (sorry…gross, I know.) Does fish oil work against postpartum D? Is there another source of the fatty acids that works that does not cause the gross side effects?
Read answer →Huffing Highs
I came home from work sick yesterday and found my son in his room huffing glue. I was shocked! He is only 13. We had a long talk about how dangerous it was to do this. He said he didn’t know how dangerous it was and that he had only done it a few times over the last few months. He says he will not do it anymore. I think he was pretty scared to learn about the brain damage that huffing causes. We looked it up on the internet together so he could see that it wasn’t just his dad that said it was dangerous. I am a single dad and I am not sure what to do now. I am going to enroll him in an after school program so he does not have so much free time everyday before I get home from work. I think this is when he gets into trouble. I am worried that he has been huffing more than he has admitted he was. I do not know if he has an addiction or not. Should I take him to a doctor or psychiatrist to find out if he has an addiction? I am not sure who the person is that I am supposed to go to for help in this kind of situation.
Read answer →12 year-old drug use
How worried should I be if I saw one of my 12 year old son’s good friends smoking a joint behind the mall? I was shocked to see this and I thought we had at least a couple more years before these kids would be exposed to drugs and alcohol. My son swears he has never done drugs and he says he didn’t know that his friend was using drugs. I have a feeling I am not getting the whole story. What should I do? I want to forbid my son to see this other boy, I want to make my son take a drug test, I want to yell at this boy’s parents – but everything seems wrong. I don’t know what to do to protect my son.
Read answer →13 year old creative introvert!
My 13 year old son has a problem with self confidence and self esteem. He has always been shy but he is a lovely person and a great artist and a true pleasure to be around for anyone that takes the time to get to know him. I watch him with his classmates at school and he just lets them walk all over him and he never stands up for himself. It is so hard for me to sit back and watch but I don’t think having him mom wading in to fight his battles for him is going to help him in the long run. How can I get him to be more assertive and confident with his friends at school? He wants to fit in so badly so he just lets people treat him very poorly just so he’ll have a group to belong to. I tell him that real friends don’t make you do things you don’t want to do but I know my words probably don't carry the same weight as his need to fit in with his peers. I am worried that he is going to get involved with dangerous things like drugs since he seems like he’ll go along with anything just to fit in.
Read answer →New Dad's postpartum depression
This feels like a ridiculous question but I want to know if men can get postpartum depression. I don’t know what is wrong with me. My son was born 2 weeks ago and for the first week everything was great and I felt such love for him. Now for the last week or so I have been feeling so depressed and he cries all the time and I am so exhausted that I almost feel like I hate him. It is so hard for me to even write those words but it is the truth about how I feel. Is the way I am feeling normal? I can’t admit this to anyone and I feel so guilty for even having these thoughts. I just want to love my son again like any new father should. What should I do?
Read answer →Not a fairytale
My niece lives with me. She is 14 and her parents were killed in a car crash 4 years ago. I was happy at the time to take her in and raise her as my own but I must admit that it has been a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. She is now having a lot of behavior issues at school. She is hanging with a very bad crowd and she is experimenting with smoking and drugs and drinking. She was caught shoplifting before Christmas and the police brought her home a month before that suspecting her of an act of vandalism that they couldn’t prove she committed. I have 2 kids of my own aged 8 and 11. I am worried that she is a bad influence for them. Because she is older I have higher expectations for my niece than for my children but she interprets that as a double standard, as if she is Cinderella and we are the mean family that makes her work while we play. She thinks we treat her differently than we do the other kids but it really just isn’t true. I am not sure what to do with her and I am thinking about some type of boarding school for kids with conduct problems. If she was my own kid I think this would be an easy decision to make. She needs an intervention and she needs it now and the path she is on right now in this home and at this school with these friends she has is not a good one at all. But since she already feels on some level that she isn’t a real part of our family I am worried that she will feel like we are sending her away because we don’t want her anymore and that instead of making things better, this is going to cause her to get worse. She has had a really hard time and I want her to succeed in life. I also really do love her like one of my own. How do I get her out of this bad situation she is in without making her feel like we are pushing her away?
Read answer →Hope for postpartum depression!
I am a new mom who has been diagnosed with postpartum depression. I am 24. My son is now 3 months old. I am taking Sertraline because it is safe for breastfeeding mothers although I am no longer breastfeeding. I am not breastfeeding mostly because I have relapsed back to drinking. I was more than 5 years sober and now I am drinking again and this obviously does not make me a very good mother. My boyfriend is trying to be supportive but he is pretty overwhelmed right now with work and with the baby and I am sorry to say with me too. I find him kind of hard to take a lot of the time now also. I am supposed to travel North with my boyfriend over Christmas to show our baby boy off to all his relatives. I can’t imagine doing this. They would freak if they saw me drinking. Actually my boyfriend doesn’t really know how much I am drinking. Maybe I should just go there and use the day I am going up as the day I don’t drink any more? I don’t know. I feel like I can’t think straight anymore. I am in a new town and I don’t know anyone and all I do is look at this crying baby all day and my mind just can’t focus.
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