About us

Aloha! I’m Dr. Heather Phillips. I am a behavioral scientist with a PhD in biochemistry, a nationally certified toxicological chemist, and a Board-Certified Behavior Analyst licensed to provide therapy across multiple states. I have spent years studying biology, behavior, trauma, and the extraordinary ways human beings adapt when life becomes something they never expected. Yet, the science of applied behavior analysis is only part of Saltwater Alchemy’s origin story.

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I know what it means to keep showing up when your body has other plans. I live with multiple autoimmune conditions. I know the exhaustion of looking capable while quietly calculating what the most ordinary things are going to cost. I know medical gaslighting, appointments that leave more questions than answers, and the grief of discovering that health is not always something you lose once and mourn cleanly. Sometimes you grieve it in pieces, each time another version of the life you expected slips beneath the water.

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I also know chronic illness from the lens of a mother advocating and loving a child through medical uncertainty, and there is a different kind of helplessness in that water. I know the sleepless nights buried in clinical studies, the vulnerability of desperately wanting to fix what you cannot fix, and somehow continuing with laundry, work, and grocery shopping while your nervous system remains permanently on watch. I have also stood beside someone I love in the aftermath of abuse and witnessed how trauma can echo long after the immediate danger has passed, reshaping trust, safety, relationships, and ordinary moments no one else realizes have become difficult.

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Professionally, I have worked alongside children who came to school hungry after surviving a long weekend on little more than nibbles here and there. I have taught children exhausted from sleeping on concrete beneath a tattered blanket with traffic serving as their lullaby. I have hugged children carrying everything they owned in black garbage bags between foster placements because, yet another adult decided they were too difficult to keep. Then Monday morning arrived, and I observed adults wondering why they could not sit still, focus, trust, comply, or learn.

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Half a world away, I have sat beside children in Kibera whose dirt-floor classrooms somehow still filled with laughter, joy, and song, even when lunch at school might be the only meal they could count on that day. A place where clean water was precious, not promised.

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Those children taught me something no therapy textbook ever could. They taught me to look beneath behavior before trying to change it. Defiance can be fear masquerading as armor, inattention can be exhaustion, rigidity can be a pea for safety, and the person who appears unwilling to try may have already spent every ounce of energy remaining simply making it through the door.

I have watched that same invisible weight be carried by adults. I have seen caregivers become so consumed with keeping someone they love above water that somewhere along the way, they began drowning themselves. I have watched brilliant, capable people quietly unravel beneath things that seem effortless to everyone around them simply because their brain was wired differently and nobody bothered to notice. I have witnessed college students with ADHD suffer in silence and be made to feel shame as though they are merely lazy or unmotivated due to struggles beyond their control. I have watched the triggers of trauma destroy one relationship after another, preventing a person from forming any close attachments in the next season of life. Unfortunately, I have witnessed well-meaning systems fail people time and time again.

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You cannot live and work this close to pain and remain interested only in behavior. You learn to look beneath it. That is why I built Saltwater Alchemy. People deserve to be understood before they are asked to change.

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At Saltwater Alchemy, we combine evidence-based applied behavior analysis, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy principles, and compassionate behavioral health practices to support children, teenagers, adults, and families navigating autism, ADHD and other neurodivergence, anxiety, executive functioning challenges, trauma, chronic illness, caregiver burnout, and major life transitions.

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I believe fiercely in science, data, measurable outcomes, and evidence-based interventions that genuinely improve people's lives. That part of me will always be the scientist.

But I will never mistake the data for the person.

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Behavior has a history. Anxiety has a story. Burnout has a breaking point. Trauma leaves fingerprints in unexpected places. Chronic illness reaches far beyond the body carrying the diagnosis. Sometimes the child who appears defiant is trying desperately to feel safe. Sometimes the accomplished adult who seems to have a fairytale existence is using every ounce of themselves to maintain appearances. Sometimes the caregiver who needs to escape for an afternoon still loves the person they care for beyond measure.

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We will never promise that life stops hurting or pretend that growth is graceful. I know better than to make those promises. Some losses leave wreckage, and some storms redraw the coastline so completely that there is no returning to the shore we remember.

Our work is not about becoming fearless or returning to who you were before life happened. It is about learning to move forward in the life that exists now, to build meaningful skills, make room for grief without allowing it to author everything that comes next, and find ways to thrive even when the water is nothing like what you expected.

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Here, healing and learning will always be more than data points on a graph, CPT codes, diagnoses, and insurance-driven treatment plans.

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Shipwrecks are not the end of the story; they are the place where something stronger learns to breathe beneath the waves.