Emma Kate Freatman: SPACE Therapy for Anxious Kids

Most treatment for a child's anxiety puts the child in the room. SPACE does the opposite. It is an evidence-based intervention for pediatric anxiety and OCD, developed at the Yale Child Study Center by Dr. Eli Lebowitz, and it works on the child by working with the parents. Twelve to fourteen sessions, and the kid may never attend one.

Our guest is Emma Kate Freatman, a licensed professional counselor with a private practice in Wilton, Connecticut. Before going into practice full time she worked at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, where she was intensively trained in dialectical behavior therapy and cognitive processing therapy and ran intensive outpatient groups for adults and adolescents. She still contracts there doing trauma and PTSD work in the transitional living program. Earlier she worked for Kids in Crisis, in outreach and in their safe haven shelter, and as an in-school teen talk counselor at a Connecticut high school. She is licensed in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

Emma Kate opens with what a parent should actually watch for before deciding a child needs help: changes in sleep, appetite, and mood that outlast the stressor that caused them, headaches and stomachaches, and a social withdrawal that does not resolve in a couple of weeks. She talks about the teenager who does not want to be there, why she spends the first several sessions building rapport instead of teaching coping skills, and how she handles confidentiality so a child is never surprised by what gets shared.

Then she and Lisa get into the part that matters here. Anxiety produces avoidance, and a frightened parent accommodates it, which is a reasonable instinct that ends up feeding the thing. Emma Kate walks through protecting versus demanding, the mental health day that was sometimes the right call and sometimes a dodge, and what happens when a child is anxious about going to the other house and can feel their parent is anxious about it too. They also cover therapists in custody cases, requests to testify, and what a parent gets out of the training even though the outcomes are measured on the child.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What SPACE stands for, where it came from, and why the parent is the one in the session
• Anxiety defined simply: overestimating the threat, underestimating your ability to handle it
• The changes in sleep, appetite, mood, and friendships that mean a child needs support
• Protecting vs demanding, and why neither response builds your child's confidence
• How accommodations you never noticed end up feeding your child's avoidance
• Why a child in a custody fight reads your regulation as the answer to whether they are safe
• How a therapist handles confidentiality when parents are in conflict, and requests to testify
• Why SPACE can be a route forward when your ex will not agree to therapy for your child

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What SPACE stands for, and meeting Emma Kate Freatman
3:00 Signs a child needs support: sleep, mood, appetite, pulling away
5:00 The kid who refuses to be there, and building rapport first
9:00 How much a parent gets to know, at ten and at seventeen
13:00 Confidentiality, and never surprising a child with what you share
15:00 Parents in conflict, and being asked to testify in court
19:00 How SPACE differs from CBT: treating the child through the parent
23:00 Protecting vs demanding, and accommodations that feed avoidance
25:00 School refusal, and the anxiety around going to the other house
29:00 What the sessions look like, and where to find Emma Kate

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Emma Kate Freatman, LPC (clinician profile, Silver Hill Hospital): https://silverhillhospital.org/clinician/emma-kate-freatman/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.