Madelyn Lemoine, LCSW
Let me tell you a little about me.
Most of my clients are holding something heavy for someone else—a child with a chronic condition, a parent after a brain injury, a brother or sister whose diagnosis reorganized the whole family.
They're competent, capable, and running on empty. And they've usually spent years being the person who's fine.
You don't have to be fine here.
How I Work
Where I Come From:
My path to this work started in a primary care clinic for kids and adults with complex medical and developmental needs. I spent much of my time as a bridge connecting families, medical teams, and outside agencies. When someone you love has complex medical needs, you are suddenly dealing with a dozen different systems at once. I helped families navigate that maze.
A lot of my job was translation. I'd help doctors understand what was actually happening at home—like why a care plan wasn't working because a parent hadn't slept in four days, or transportation fell through, or a caregiver's own depression was put on hold because there was just no time.
Those years taught me how stress, grief, shifting identities, and family dynamics all tangle together over the long haul of caregiving. Most importantly, they taught me how to sit with people in the messy, uncertain middle of things without rushing them toward a neat answer.
What Sessions Actually Look Like:
My background is in family systems, which means I look at the whole picture instead of assuming the "problem" lives inside one person. While my clinical training includes Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Internal Family Systems, and Somatic Experiencing, you don't need to know what those are. What it actually looks like in the room is a mix of the practical and the deep.
Some days, we're tactical. We might figure out how to handle a specific conversation, what to do when a sibling shuts down, or how to hold a boundary with a relative who just doesn't get it. Other days are much slower, giving you a chance to sit with the exhaustion or emotions you simply haven't had room to feel. You get to decide what kind of day it is.
I won't give you toxic positivity, and I won't just nod silently. I bring steadiness, compassion, and—whenever we can find it—a sense of humor.
What I’ll Create Space For:
There's room here for all of it. The grief that arrives long before anyone has died. The intense frustration toward someone you love more than anything, and the guilt that inevitably follows it. The days you're fine, the days you're not, and the days where you honestly can't tell the difference.
There's also room for the good. Caregiving families get so used to only talking about the hard parts, but there is deep joy in this life, too. The milestone that took years to reach, the inside jokes, the moments that would make zero sense to anyone outside your house. You can bring those here without having to explain why they matter.
And there is room for laughing. So much of caregiving is absurd, and saying that out loud to someone who actually gets it is a relief all its own.
My job isn't to "fix" your situation—because much of it isn't something to be fixed—but to make sure you don't have to carry it alone.
What I Believe About This Work
Caregiving is love, and it's also labor. The love part gets all the attention. The labor part often goes unpaid, unscheduled, and largely unacknowledged, even though it fills your days. I treat it as real work, because that's what it is—and because it's hard to name your exhaustion when nobody around you calls it a job.
You're allowed to want your own life. Wanting time, privacy, a career, a marriage that isn't organized around appointments—none of that means you love the person less. Most of my clients need to hear this out loud more than once.
You're allowed to grieve the life you expected. Most parents picture a certain kind of family before their child arrives. When a diagnosis changes that picture, the grief is real—for the childhood you imagined, and sometimes for the life you had before. And yes, it can look like envy: watching other families worry about report cards and middle school drama while you're managing something else entirely. That doesn't make you ungrateful or a bad parent. It makes sense, and you can say it out loud here.
Siblings are not extras. In families organized around one person's needs, the other kids learn to be low-maintenance. That has a cost, and it usually shows up decades later. It deserves its own attention, not a mention at the end of someone else's care plan.
I'll be honest with you about what can and can't change. Some diagnoses don't improve. Some family members won't change. What can shift is how alone you are inside it, and how you want to move through what's in front of you.
Licensure & Background
Licensed Clinical Social Worker (CSW.09928754) - Colorado
Six years of experience as a medical social worker in a primary care clinic for children and adults with chronic conditions and disabilities
Former resource counselor for adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities
Education & Training
BA in Psychology, UC Santa Cruz, California
Master of Social Work (MSW), University of Denver - concentration in Family Systems Practice