Dawn Wiggins

f a scholarship, she earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology (with a minor in Child and Family Sciences) in 2001. Ever fascinated by the family structure, she was involved in a community research center doing behavioral and in-home services with families. When she moved to Key Largo, she spent an intense few years working for the Department of Children and Families before earning her master’s and specialist degree from the University of Florida. During her years with the Department of Children and Families, Dawn saw many struggles that could have been avoided, prevented, and recovered from with the aid and support of psychotherapy.

“When one part of a system changes. The entire system is changed,” she explains. “It’s called systems theory. And it’s one of the reasons I became a therapist.”
Families are in a constant state of change. Children grow up, marriages evolve, and staying grounded during these changes can be challenging for any family—no matter what their situation. When even one patient from a family comes in for help, the entire family can benefit. Parents in particular can have unimaginable influence that can make or break the family structure.
“Parents are more powerful than they think. Unless a child has had a specific trauma or syndrome, the majority of issues in behavior can be resolved through parental intervention.”

Family and relationships are certainly core elements of her practice, but addiction is also a condition she has had great success in treating. When patients get to that point where they need help, want help and are ready--there is hope.
“The family and the therapist can’t make that initial choice for them. They have to have some skin in the game, they have to start making those empowered choices and owning their therapeutic process.”
Because she has experience with one herself, Dawn works with many clients who experience chronic illnesses. These cyclical diseases can test patients beyond measure, complicate their lives and obstruct them from reaching their goals educationally, socially, professionally, and mentally. Dawn can empathize, instruct and empower patients who may feel their lives will never have a semblance of normalcy. Dawn considers her approach to therapy as “very holistic.” She subscribes to the idea that mind, body and spirit and are dramatically connected. She has also found that patients who have a strong spirituality, those believing in a higher power of any kind, show the most success in overcoming their struggles.
“Once that happens, there is not a lot that can’t be accomplished.”
Dawn Wiggins has worked with children, adolescents, victims of domestic violence, and done extensive work in the area of addiction and other co-occurring disorders as well as work with the LGBT community. She is intuitive, direct and adept at treating a broad range of presenting problems including addiction, personality disorders, mood disorders, chronic pain as a presenting problem and family and relationship issues.