ARIANA LEWIS, MSW, MPH, RYT-200

The pursuit of a more meaningful, peaceful, authentic, and joyful life is always worthwhile. With gentleness and warmth, Ariana supports her clients of all ages to build the confidence and skills to meet life’s challenges with patience, self-compassion, and a deeper sense of connection to themselves and others. Ariana draws on trauma-informed modalities that emphasize self-determination, emotional skillfulness, healthy relationships, and the mind-body connection. These include Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Motivational Interviewing, Narrative Therapy, and Child-Centered Play Therapy. Ariana supports clients to develop profound insight and lifelong skills to effectively locate, express, and care for their emotional needs with dignity and courage. These skills may look different for kids, parents, teens, or adults, but they are all driven by a holistic understanding of how trauma, change, and emotions show up internally and socially. Additionally, Ariana brings a queer, LGBTQ+ -informed and critical systemic perspective to all of her work.

Professionally and personally, Ariana is grounded by humility, humor, and an ethic of nonviolence. She is guided by her background in community health research and Buddhist and Jewish spirituality, as well as her training as a yoga teacher, artist, and early childhood educator. 

Services Provided

Ariana offers therapeutic services for individuals and families. She meets with a wide range of clients including adults, teens, and children. 

Her services include: 

• Play Therapy 
• Individual Psychotherapy
• Family Therapy
• Psychoeducation

Some of Ariana’s specialties include: 

• Kids and Teens 

  • Childhood Anxiety
  • ADHD
  • Emotion Regulation and Communication
  • Behavior Challenges
  • Managing Change
  • Parent-Child Relationships

• Teens and Adults 

  • Trauma 
  • Relationships, Codependency, & Attachment 
  • Identity and Spirituality
  • Grief
  • Life Changes
  • Anxiety Disorders 
  • Queer and LGBTQ+ issues
  • Mind-body connection

Play Therapy and Parent-Child Relationships

Ariana offers personalized play therapy treatment in the beautiful Atlanta Center for Wellness playroom. Foundational to her approach is Child-Centered Play Therapy, an evidence-based therapy effective for a wide range of challenges children and families face. Through play therapy, children build critical skills related to emotional communication, regulation, problem-solving, and social interaction, and learn to process difficult experiences in healthy, age-appropriate ways.  For parents, it can feel scary when a child is struggling, and it's natural for parents to feel a sense of urgency about their child's treatment. Ariana understands these concerns and is here to support you and your child to evolve over time. She enjoys working with parents to better understand themselves and their children. While the playroom is primarily the child's domain, intentional parent-child play sessions with Ariana can be part of meaningful growth, and are one of several strategies parents can learn to best reinforce their child’s efforts in therapy. Open communication between Ariana and your family ensures a collaborative approach, helping to create a consistent and supportive environment for your child, as they are showing up today, and in their development over time. 

Relationships, Codependency, & Attachment Issues

Ariana is deeply committed to walking alongside her clients as they undertake the courageous and incredibly worthwhile work to transform their relationships with others and themselves. Ariana uses trauma therapy techniques to help clients uncover and reshape the core beliefs about themselves and their relationships that might fuel maladaptive behaviors, coping strategies, and conflicts. These techniques allow clients to face overwhelming and deep-rooted emotions such as shame, fear, and self-loathing safely and gradually. Ariana supports clients to establish and maintain boundaries that feel authentic and sustainable, including in relationship systems that involve substance use, abuse, mental or physical illness, or other forms of complex and chronic dysfunction. Her approach draws on the latest research in somatic-based psychotherapy, allowing clients to truly integrate across mind-body their new insights and skills, creating real change in reactive patterns and client’s capacities to regulate and respond more intentionally. Ariana empowers her clients to more effectively identify and express their needs, determine for themselves their role in their relationship systems, and build stronger, more meaningful connections with others and themselves. Undertaking this attachment-focused work can often have robust impacts on clients’ experiences of anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other mental and physical health issues. 

Grief, Life Changes, & Anxiety Disorders  

Grief is a universal experience that can arise around losses big and small, anticipated, chronic, or unexpected.  Grief can be complex and layered in ways that take time, courage, and patience to uncover. Ariana believes that the therapeutic relationship provides one form of safe and compassionate witnessing that is critical for anyone to hold and express their grief. For those interested in exploring different forms of spirituality as a tool for understanding loss, Ariana guides clients to find a framework and practice that feels meaningful to them. Ariana supports clients to build everyday skills for managing and caring for their grief and the host of emotions that come with it, helping them honor their loss while learning to cope with the overwhelming feelings that accompany it. For those clients facing various changes in their lives or identities, Ariana offers a wealth of techniques for managing uncertainty, fear, and other challenging aspects of change, to foster a sense of stability and confidence. For those experiencing anxiety disorders, Ariana offers a safe, supportive environment where clients can explore the complexity of their emotions without judgment. She works with clients to manage anxiety by exploring the underlying beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors that contribute to distress, offering practical somatic and cognitive tools for relief. Regardless of the nature of their suffering, Ariana supports her clients in finding peace, acceptance, and emotional balance throughout their lives.

Queer Issues

Ariana brings an intersectional and queer lens to all of her work, and enjoys working with clients who are exploring topics specific to queer life, relationships, identities, and more. These include gender-related issues and non-traditional relationships.

Education, Licensure, and Certification

• MSW Clinical Social Work, University of Georgia
• MPH Community Health, Boston University
• BS Psychology, Wesleyan University
• RYT-200 Registered Yoga Teacher, Yoga Alliance
• Clinical training completed with the Odyssey Family Counseling Center and Grady Hospital ACT Team 
• Orienting to Neurobiological Safety: Trauma-Informed DBT & RODBT for Stabilization  (2024)
• Certificate in Trauma-Focused CBT, Medical University of South Carolina (2022)
• Certificate in Somatic Embodiment and Regulation Strategies, Collectively Rooted (2022)