Dr Sharon Verniero

Focus: Marriage and Family Therapy, Mastering Life Transitions and Unexpected Events, Assisting Students with Learning and Developmental Disabilities and Mentoring their Families

Feeling lost, alone, helpless, confused and hesitant, and don’t quite know what to do or who to talk with? Are your children not performing as you hoped them would? Are they always getting into some kind of trouble? You’re not alone n feeling confused. Like many, I too, have dealt with the ups and downs in life. That has given me insight and the empathy to hear to your story fully. I support people finding their way through the fog of uncertainty, helping them to develop the confidence to pursue their own best way forward.

For over thirty-five years, I have listened and encouraged people to share their concerns in their own words. That has proven to be an invaluable key when working therapeutically. This approach has allowed me to connect with people to help them find the strategies that work for them.

I discovered my passion for helping people early in my life. I was hospitalized at a young age, and it was at that time that I realized that I wanted to help people to recover, heal and provide them with comfort. I understood that the same event can be seen as a marker of misfortune or good luck depending on how I framed it. When we see past experiences through new glasses, we all have the power to rewrite the meaning of our own story. I don’t have the answer for what you may need to change, but you do. What perhaps you don’t have, at the moment, is access to the how. Even though you cannot change your history, you can change the way you understand it and then your future. Together, you and I can write a new story with a different meaning from where you understand today.

My mother and my daughter are both learning disabled. Thus, I also developed a passion for helping people with learning and developmental disabilities. Helping students to understand themselves not as disabled or dumb, but as people who learn differently and need to be taught differently is a specific focus for me. In our language-based world, literacy is considered a mark of intelligence-but this was not always true. In other times, storytelling and survival skills were more valued as signs of intelligence. How many of our children would see themselves differently, if we understood intelligence more broadly? After all, it was Einstein who said that “everybody is a genius in their own right. If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, that fish will live its whole life believing it’s stupid.”

In recognition that each child is unique and needs individual care and treatment, I conduct assessments, formulate approaches that are easily understood by parents and students, create plans allowing students to cope with their issues and succeed academically, and provide a procedure for educational consultation to school boards.

Thus, whether I have been involved in therapy or an educational assessment, I have always believed in the hopefulness of re-authoring personal stories to promote change and the spirit of Einstein when working with people.