Esther Miller specializes in helping people through pivotal moments in their lives.

Transitions, her counseling center on Main Street in Cooperstown, serves not only adults and couples, but adolescents as well. Working with young people has become a big part of what Miller does, partly because adolescence itself is layered with transformations.

Miller said that when she first opened her practice over a year and a half ago, she didn't know what to expect. Since that time she has adopted an "if you build it, they will come" philosophy. So have her clients.

"I don't subscribe to the Woody Allen school of therapy," said Miller, "where people go in and they don't get back out for the next twenty years and there's no end in sight."

One of the options Miller offers clients is a short-term solution-based therapy which sometimes runs as quickly as six sessions.

Miller wants to work to counteract the stigma that is often associated with seeking treatment for emotional problems. She accomplishes this with her perspective on the purpose of psychotherapy, which she sees as an individual's effort to tranform his life.

"The goal," she said, "is to provide experienced and caring help for people going through changes in their lives or outlooks."

Miller said that adolescents have a set of problems specific to that phase of development, composed of a variety of influences. Social concerns become as influential as the family circle to many young people, and the issues they face are different than those faced by previous generations.

"Young people everywhere are confronted by similar issues," Miller said. "What we have in other places, we have here."

Conflict, the prime catalyst for change, is often the reason why adolescents seek Miller's guidance. She said that families often fall into patterns and when one person's behavior changes, the entire group is affected.

"We are all parts of systems," Miller said. "When there is a drinker in a family, for example, the family may come to blame that person for a lot of the unhappiness. If the person makes an effort to change that habit, then the rest of the family has to change along with it."

Miller said that once the word got out about Transitions, adolescents started coming to see her of their own volition, unaware of the necessity for parental permission, not to mention the practical matter of payment.

"Kids have to deal with a lot," Miller said. "Social strata creates a lot of pressure. But kids are resilient. They do adjust. Sometimes their families identify a problem with the child, and that's why they come to see me, but it's really a family problem manifesting itself in the child. So my work becomes teaching the child to teach its parents to parent it properly."

Miller said that people are secretive and families often become like a society within a society. Parents often blame themselves for the difficulties faced by many adolescents, such as the lowered age of exposure to substances and sex.

"Adolescents do help to raise one another," Miller said. She said that times are changing: twenty years ago, a size zero didn't even exist. Now she has to remind adolescent girls that there are only eight supermodels in the world and that Marilyn Monroe was a size fourteen.

Distorted body image is a common problem among adolescent girls. Miller often finds herself explaining the predisposition of genetic shapes; she has clients bring in photographs of other women in the family who are similarly shaped.

Quite a few people come to see Miller because they are seeking a new path towards self-fulfillment, or to work on spiritual or creative issues.

Miller has an impressive roster of credentials to back up her "big bag of tools and tricks" aimed at assisting people through the crucial moments of their lives. She has Sexual Assault Forensic Examiner (S.A.F.E.) Training from the Columbia School of Nursing, New York State required training in Identification and Reporting of Child Abuse, a bachelor's degree from SUNY New Paltz and a master's degree in social work from Fordham University. She is a licensed clinical social worker with a post-masters certificate program in Treatment of Drug and Alcohol Abusing Clients from New York University. Her ACSW credential was attained in November of 1999.

Dr. Anne Nafziger, a doctor of internal medicine at Bassett said, "Miller is really dedicated to her clients. She's called me a number of times with urgent medical issues faced by her clients. That's the hallmark of a therapist who cares. She's not just concerned with psychological or social issues, but also with medical ones."

Miller said she works closely with Bassett Hospital and Cooperstown Central School to ensure that young people in the community get the care they need. Christine McBrearty-Hulse, guidance counselor at Cooperstown Elementary School, said that Miller offers a much needed service, since therapists who treat adolescent clients are few.

"There used to be four other therapists with private practices in town when I arrived," Miller said. "They've since closed their doors."

But hers is open.