Side Quest Psychotherapy Was Born as an Act of Resistance
Against the myth that life is supposed to follow a straight line — and the systems that define worth by how much you produce, achieve, and conform.
You Were Never Broken. You Were Just Handed the Wrong Map.
From a young age, most of us are handed a script: get good grades, go to college, land a stable job, build a life that looks right on paper. But for many people — especially those with neurodivergent wiring, eating disorders, chronic illness, or marginalized identities — that script was never written for them. And when it doesn’t fit, the world calls it a personal failure.
We call it a systemic mismatch.
Side Quest Psychotherapy was founded by Jenna Stone, LCSW-C, whose own path was interrupted and rerouted by eating disorder treatment, iatrogenic harm, and ultimately, a therapeutic relationship that finally got it right. That experience — of being failed by systems and then genuinely helped by one person willing to show up differently — is the reason this practice exists.
We get it, because we’ve lived it and we see it every day in our work: the exhaustion of masking, the relentlessness of OCD, the way an eating disorder can quietly organize an entire life, the grief of being misgendered in a medical setting, and the particular frustration of navigating systems that were never designed for your nervous system, your body, or your identity.
This is a space where complexity is honored, not pathologized. Where recovery doesn’t mean getting “back on track,” but finding your own rhythm and path forward.
❝ Side Quest Psychotherapy was created for everyone who spent years playing a character they never chose — the late-identified neuroqueers, the highly sensitive, the ones who were always too much and never quite enough. You were never the problem. It was always the wrong campaign. ❞
Who We Serve
We are an OCD and eating disorder specialty practice serving neurodivergent people, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and those who have not felt fully seen — or have been actively harmed — in traditional care settings.
Many of our clients are carrying more than one thing at once: an eating disorder and late-identified autism. OCD and gender dysphoria. ARFID and a nervous system that has never quite felt safe. Body-focused repetitive behaviors and a lifetime of being told they are too much. We understand these experiences do not exist in isolation, and we do not treat them that way.
We work with adults, teens, and children (ages 10+) across Maryland, Virginia, and Florida via telehealth. We also offer nationwide recovery coaching and patient advocacy for those who need support beyond the therapy room.
Our Mission
We exist to provide ethical, autonomy-supportive care for people who have never felt fully understood in traditional care systems. Many of our clients arrive after years of treatment that focused on symptoms while overlooking context — their nervous system, lived experience, identity, and the environments shaping their daily lives.
We are not here to put you back on someone else’s path. We are here to help you build one that is sustainable, self-directed, and genuinely yours.
Why This Work Matters
Specialty mental health care has a well-documented problem: higher levels of care and more intensive interventions are often treated as the default solution, even when they can cause harm — particularly for people in fat bodies, neurodivergent brains, and medically complex presentations. Rigid protocols, compliance-based models, and symptom-focused treatment can reinforce stigma, deepen trauma, and erase individual needs in the name of care.
For people with eating disorders, OCD, and anxiety-related conditions, this pattern is especially familiar. Intensive treatment can stabilize — but many people are discharged back into the same communities, relationships, sensory environments, and stressors that shaped their struggles in the first place, without the real-world support needed to navigate what comes next. Too often, this creates a revolving door: stabilization in treatment, followed by relapse in the community.
We believe people do better when support exists where they actually live, eat, work, and relate.
That’s why Side Quest integrates psychotherapy with recovery coaching grounded in lived experience and harm reduction — offering support in the real contexts of daily life, not just the clinical ones. Instead of defaulting to escalation, we focus on building sustainable, autonomy-preserving support that reduces risk, honors body diversity, and helps recovery take root in the environments where it actually has to survive.
When higher levels of care are genuinely necessary, we don’t disappear. We collaborate, plan thoughtfully, and make sure every transition feels supported rather than abrupt. Because healing doesn’t happen in a clinical vacuum — it happens in kitchens, classrooms, workplaces, and relationships. In the real, messy, textured complexity of your actual life.
The Quest Is The Story
In gaming, a side quest is the journey off the main map — where the most important skills are built, where identity takes shape, and where meaning emerges. At Side Quest Psychotherapy, we believe that many experiences labeled as “detours” — time lost to an eating disorder, a late autism diagnosis, years spent in systems that missed what was really going on — are actually the most central parts of your story.
Recovery is not about getting back onto someone else’s track. It’s about understanding your needs, honoring your nervous system, and building a life that works for you.
Your side quest isn’t a distraction.
It’s the real story.
And you get to be the main character.
Ready to feel seen, understood, and supported in ways that honor who you are?
If this story resonates, your next step doesn’t have to be big.
Start with a free 15-minute consultation to explore whether Side Quest Psychotherapy is the right place for this part of your journey.