psychotherapy+ Ketamine STUDIO

Neurodivergent Support— ADHD, Autism & OCD
Too many neurodivergent kids spend years being managed for their behavior rather than understood for their neurology. Ray’s approach is strengths-based and practically grounded — he helps neurodivergent teens and young adults build systems that work with how their brain actually operates, and helps families understand neurodivergent identity rather than pathologize it. The goal is not a more compliant kid. It’s a kid who knows how they work — and a family that knows how to support that.
Post Residential & Wilderness Transitions
The most dangerous moment in residential treatment is not the crisis that sent your family there. It’s the first ninety days after discharge — when the structure dissolves, the old environment returns, and the patterns that were paused start reasserting themselves. Ray specializes in this window. He works with the teen, the family, and the system around them to maintain what was built in treatment and prevent the regression that most families experience without ongoing support. Treatment doesn’t end when your kid comes home. That’s where it begins.
Executive Functioning & Failure to Launch
For young adults who are genuinely stuck — not unmotivated, but unable to find traction — and for the families who love them and don’t know how to help without making it worse. What looks like avoidance is usually anxiety. What looks like defiance is usually shame. Ray understands the difference and works with both the young adult and the family system to shift the dynamics keeping everyone frozen.
Ray teaches executive functioning skills including time management, organization, task initiation, planning, emotional regulation. This isn't life coaching, it's therapeutic skill-building integrated with deeper work on identity, shame, and family dynamics.
Family Systems & Relational Repair
Ray works with entire family systems — not just the identified patient. Whether it’s relational struggles, divorce, blended families, coparenting conflict, sibling dynamics, communication breakdown, or couples at the edge of what they can sustain, he helps families shift the patterns that have become the problem and build structure that actually fits how they function. Individual therapy doesn’t work when the family system pulls everyone back. Ray addresses what’s keeping the whole system stuck.
Behavioral Challenges & Oppositional Teens
Ray specializes in teens with oppositional behavior, substance use, school refusal, or explosive anger. He combines firm boundaries with deep empathy, understanding what's driving the behavior while holding teens accountable. He also works with parents to balance consequences with connection, stop enabling patterns, and create structure that reduces conflict.
Oppositional behavior is often driven by anxiety, trauma, or neurodivergence. Ray addresses root causes while teaching healthier coping.
Concierge Crisis Consulting
For the situations that have outgrown what weekly therapy can manage — the high-stakes family moments, the public or professional crises, the cases where someone needs a clinician who can move fast, think clearly, and coordinate across providers until someone has the full picture. Ray offers concierge consultation for individuals, families, and couples navigating the moments most clinicians aren’t equipped to handle. Discreet, direct, and built for complexity.
Specialties

Lead Psychotherapist & Family Consultant
Ray Demers
LCSW
Systems-based work for families navigating neurodivergence, behavioral complexity, and the moments that can’t wait.
Ray's clients are families, couples, and individuals who are in moments that can't wait around until next week to be addressed. Many of his clients have already tried to fix it. They've done the research, made the hard decisions, called the programs. Some of it helped. And then things came back — or came home, or came of age, or came to a head — and the old patterns were waiting.
What Ray understands, and what most clinicians miss, is that the problem is rarely just the person. It's the system they live inside. The way everyone around them has adapted, overcompensated, and exhausted themselves trying to hold it together. Ray works with the whole system — not to assign blame, but because that's where sustainable change actually happens.
He is equally at home doing deep family therapy with a neurodivergent teen and their overwhelmed parents, coordinating post-residential wraparound plan for a young adult stepping down from treatment, and providing discreet concierge consultation for high-stakes family or professional crises that need someone who can move fast and hold the whole picture. Complex diagnoses, high-conflict dynamics, the situations most clinicians aren't equipped to handle — that's where Ray does his best work.
Ray helps people navigate the complexity of transitions that require more than weekly therapy can provide. He works with teens and young adults with ADHD, autism, OCD, behavioral challenges, and other neurodivergent traits, as well as the families struggling to support them. He helps neurodivergent individuals succeed in relationships, social environments, and their professional worlds without masking who they are. His work is diverse, blending a combination of skills training, executive function coaching, and deep, relational therapeutic work.
Direct, grounded, and compassionate, Ray meets his clients where they are, whether that's crisis, exhaustion, or simply not knowing what to do next.


Your kid isn't broken, the system they're trying to fit into is. My job is to help them build a life that works for their brain, not against it.
Ray Demers, LCSW
Professional Experience
Ray brings clinical expertise and practical systems thinking to families navigating neurodivergence, behavioral challenges, and complex transitions.
Joining Higher Ground's in January 2026, he specializes in family systems work, neurodivergent support, and post-treatment integration for teens and young adults whose needs exceed traditional weekly therapy.
His background includes extensive work with families post-residential treatment, neurodivergent teens struggling with executive functioning, and high-stress family systems requiring both therapeutic intervention and care coordination. Ray has worked with hundreds of families dealing with ADHD, autism, OCD, oppositional behavior, and "failure to launch" dynamics.
Before clinical work, Ray spent years in education and youth programming with neurodivergent students and behaviorally complex teens. That hands-on experience taught him what actually works when kids are melting down or shutting down, and what doesn't.
Ray's expertise includes family systems therapy, DBT skills training, executive functioning coaching, wilderness therapy transitions, and concierge family coordination for complex cases requiring multi-provider collaboration. Ray is licensed in CT, MA, NH and ME. He's equally comfortable in IEP meetings, family therapy sessions, and crisis interventions.

Master of Social Work (MSW)
Clinical degree emphasizing systems thinking, case management, and coordinated care to address individuals within their family, school, and community contexts. Licensed in CT, MA, NH, and VT.
Specialized Training in Family Systems Therapy
Therapeutic approach that views problems as patterns within the family system, not just individual pathology. Focuses on shifting relationship dynamics and communication to create sustainable change.
DBT-Informed Practice
Dialectical Behavior Therapy teaches practical skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and mindfulness, especially effective for teens with behavioral dysregulation.
Residential therapy transition specialist
Specialized training in post-treatment integration, relapse prevention, and family reunification after rehab, wilderness or residential programs during the critical first 90 days home.
Trauma-Informed Care Training
An approach that recognizes how trauma shapes behavior and nervous system responses. Emphasizes safety, trust, and reducing re-traumatization in therapeutic relationships. Expert in group facilitation and creative distress tolerance interventions.
Neurodivergent Support Specialist
Expertise in strengths-based support for ADHD, autism, OCD, and other neurodivergent traits, helping individuals build systems that work with their brain, not against it.