About Michelle
Michelle Lakefield, LPC, offers a calm, straightforward approach for people feeling overwhelmed by stress, anxiety, depression, or life changes. She makes space for honest talk and helps clients name what feels hard. Her style is welcoming and nonjudgmental so people can start practical work right away.
With twenty years of experience as a licensed professional counselor in New Jersey, she draws on several evidence-informed methods to guide sessions. Michelle blends client-centered listening with goal-focused techniques so each meeting has a clear purpose.
Background and approach
That mix is helpful for everyday worries, mood challenges, and relationship strains. Clients often bring concerns such as grief, anger, intimacy issues, parenting stress, compassion fatigue, and ADHD-related struggles. She also supports people dealing with trauma and abuse, eating and self-esteem problems, bipolar mood issues, and the ripple effects of family conflict.
Michelle pays attention to how these areas overlap in a person’s life so treatment feels relevant. Her approach emphasizes practical steps between sessions. She uses cognitive-behavioral strategies to spot unhelpful thoughts and behaviors.
Solution-focused tools help set small, achievable goals. Internal Family Systems ideas are used when people want to understand different parts of themselves. Michelle aims to make starting therapy simple.
She invites questions, helps set realistic goals, and adjusts the pace to fit each person. Sessions are offered in English and she works with clients living both inside and outside the United States.
How these approaches translate to online care
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on listening and understanding the person’s experience. In online sessions this means the therapist follows the client’s lead, reflects feelings, and helps clarify what matters most. It is useful for building trust and sorting out emotional concerns.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, helps people notice unhelpful thoughts and change behaviors that keep problems going. Online CBT often includes short exercises, thought records, and homework between sessions to practice new skills for anxiety, depression, or ADHD-related habits.
Finding the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will discuss goals, preferences, and what has or hasn’t helped before, then recommend methods to try. That collaborative process can be adjusted over time based on progress and feedback.
Online therapy offers practical benefits like easier scheduling and access from different locations. Video calls let visual cues guide conversation, phone sessions can fit into a work break or need less bandwidth, and live chat or text sessions are useful for brief check-ins or when writing helps express things more clearly. These options make it easier to keep continuity of care and practice skills between meetings.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Parenting issues
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- New Jersey
- Languages
- English
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