Zoe Muller, MSW, CSWA (she/her), is an experienced, dedicated, culturally sensitive and competent social worker who works with children, adolescents and their families, including people with mental and/or intellectual disabilities, and older adults and their families. She also is JFCS’ Intake Manager.
Zoe’s Ideal Client
Working with young children and adolescents – and their families – is Zoe’s forté. She leans on decades of counseling experience and the philosophies of Alfred Adler, Martin Buber and Janusz Korczak. If you believe, as she does, that play is the best way children express themselves, Zoe has a toolbox to transfer to her clients and their children to help with issues like anxiety and depression.
Her Approach to Helping
Children process their issues and challenges through play, the very first way in which we all communicate. Talk therapy – a great tool for adolescents and their family members – is not for the youngest among us, nor for most of those who are neurodivergent. Zoe is here to help guide parents to be their best at their most important job while supporting their children where they struggle.
Her Values as a Therapist
Fluent in three languages, Zoe was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, moved to Israel as a child – eventually completing her military service and higher education there – and spent a lot of time in the United States, settling here permanently in 2011. She attended Hebrew University in Jerusalem at which she earned my bachelors’ and master’s degrees. She gained language fluency while living on three different continents, and with the language skills came a knack for observing people and cultural competency, allowing her to be very at home with clients from Russian-, Hebrew- and English-speaking backgrounds.
In her free time, Zoe dedicates herself to family, loves to travel, gobble up great literature and absorb the nature for which the Pacific Northwest is so well known.
via: jfcs-portland.org
