Transformative Growth Counseling

Transformative Growth Counseling We are a nonprofit therapy practice. IL Naperville, Chicago, Ottawa & Kankakee. We take Ins. & offer sliding scale.

FL: Jax/Orange Park, Cave Creek, AZ

Sign up for our Newsletter Here: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/sl/1sKfB9F/TGCNewsletter We are therapy practice in Naperville, Chicago and Kankakee offering counseling for individuals, couples, children and families.

Therapy works. Research consistently shows that counseling leads to meaningful, lasting change. 💙 transformativegrowth.o...
06/18/2026

Therapy works. Research consistently shows that counseling leads to meaningful, lasting change. 💙 transformativegrowth.org

Community workshops extend mental health support beyond the therapy room — meeting people where they already are. 🌱 tran...
06/17/2026

Community workshops extend mental health support beyond the therapy room — meeting people where they already are. 🌱 transformativegrowth.org

06/17/2026

🐴 Watch what happens in this video.

This horse is shaking. Not because it’s cold. Not because it’s misbehaving.

Because it’s standing next to a person whose anxiety is so intense they feel like they might leap out of their own chest — and the horse felt every bit of it as soon as they approached.

Horses mirror what’s in the room. They don’t rationalize it away. They just respond to what’s real. And what was real in that moment showed up in a full-body shake.

You can’t ride/lead/teach a horse that’s scared to death. You wait. You regulate. They regulate. Then, try again.

Children actually work the same way.

A child cannot communicate with you if they are afraid of your reaction to their emotions.

When a child learns that their feelings will be dismissed, minimized, or met with frustration — they don’t stop having those feelings. They either bury them so deep you’ll never see them coming, or they turn up the volume so loud you can’t ignore them anymore.

Neither one is manipulation.
Both are survival.

Children who overreport, who escalate, who seem to make everything a crisis — are often children who learned that the quieter version didn’t matter to anyone. And children who go silent, who say “I’m fine” and mean nothing of the sort — learned the same lesson from a different angle.

When emotions are safe, children don’t need to perform them OR hide them. They can just feel them — and grow.

That’s the work we do at Transformative Growth Counseling.

Real kids. Real safety. Real healing.

📍 TransformativeGrowth.org

We partner with local colleges and universities to bring peer-led mental health support to students and staff. 🌱 transfo...
06/15/2026

We partner with local colleges and universities to bring peer-led mental health support to students and staff. 🌱 transformativegrowth.org

06/13/2026

The six-month waitlist. The provider who doesn’t take your insurance. The intake form that never got a callback. Apparently the only one who called back was a clown.

At Transformative Growth Counseling we do things differently. Testing, treatment planning, and therapy — equine and traditional — all in one place. No bouncing between offices. No repeating your child’s story to three different strangers. One roof. One team. One very enthusiastic clown.

Because here’s the thing about equine therapy — it reaches kids that nothing else can. The child who won’t sit in a chair. Who shuts down in a traditional office. Who has decided adults can’t be trusted. Cocoa doesn’t care about any of that. She just shows up in her costume and somehow the walls come down.

When we say your therapist is a clown, we mean it as the highest compliment.

No insurance? We have grant funding & can see your child anyway.
Been told your kid is too difficult? Afraid of therapists? Refuses to participate ?

Especially come anyway.

👉 www.transformativegrowth.org

Yes, Medicaid and Medicare are also accepted, along with 30 other insurance carriers. We got you.

Tag a parent who’s been fighting this same battle.

Trauma-informed care means understanding the whole person, not just the presenting problem. It changes outcomes. 💙 trans...
06/12/2026

Trauma-informed care means understanding the whole person, not just the presenting problem.

It changes outcomes. 💙 transformativegrowth.org

Progress, not perfection. Celebrate how far you've come. 💙
06/11/2026

Progress, not perfection. Celebrate how far you've come. 💙

It’s 2026 — why are we still putting our kids in beige offices with flashcards? The research has moved on. It’s time we ...
06/11/2026

It’s 2026 — why are we still putting our kids in beige offices with flashcards? The research has moved on. It’s time we did too.

When ABA was first introduced, it changed everything for children and adults who navigate the world a little differently. That foundation matters. But the science has kept going — and so have we.

We’ve seen it firsthand: goals met, new levels reached — without the same flashcards, DTT tables, and token boards they’ve been staring at for years

Here’s what the science actually says:

📌 Equine-assisted therapies show measurable gains in social communication, emotional regulation, and adaptive behavior in children with autism — in fewer sessions than clinic-based approaches alone. (Earles-Vollrath et al.; Trzmiel et al., 2019)

📌 Experiential learning doesn’t just teach skills — it cements them. When a child practices communication, reading cues, asking for help, and self-regulation with a living animal who responds in real time - that skill lives in the body. Not just on a data sheet.

📌 Confidence built in a real environment transfers to real life. In a fluorescent-lit room - it doesn’t.

We use ABA-informed principles — but we bring them outside, into the field, with Oreo and Cocoa. These two mini therapy horses specialize in working with children and adults with disabilities. They don’t care about flashcards. Neither do we.

Same evidence base. Completely different experience.

If your child is *still* doing the same thing they did last week, last month, last year, …. it might be time to try something new.

Find out more here:

🦋 Transformative Growth Counseling

transformativegrowth.org


06/08/2026

Most kids have never been the bigger one in the room.

At TGC, our miniature therapy horses Oreo and Cocoa change that. When a child steps into a session and realizes they are the stronger one — that this small, sensitive animal is trusting them — something shifts.

They learn to slow down. To read body language. To regulate their own energy so they don’t frighten someone who needs them to be steady.

That’s not just a horsemanship concept. That’s actually the foundation of every meaningful relationship they’ll ever have — as a friend, a sibling, a partner, a parent.

Being trusted by someone smaller and more vulnerable than you is one of life’s great teachers. We just happen to deliver that lesson on four hooves.

🐴 Equine-Assisted Therapy at TGC — real clinical work, real change.
Transformative Growth Counseling | 501(c)(3)
www.transformativegrowth.org

Address

24w500 Maple Street
Naperville, IL
61348

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