About Nicole
Nicole Guessford is a licensed clinical social worker with 23 years of experience. She offers straightforward, structured telehealth sessions for people coping with stress, anxiety, trauma, parenting concerns, relationship strain, mood disorders, and ADHD. She emphasizes respect, sensitivity, and practical steps in early sessions to help clients feel the work is useful right away.
Nicole tailors conversations and plans to each person's needs. She uses a direct style and often assigns short homework between sessions.
Background and approach
She values self-care and self-compassion and encourages small, doable changes that add up over time. Her background includes long-term clinical practice across Pennsylvania and Virginia. Over two decades she has worked with a wide range of concerns from grief and chronic illness to intimacy issues and caregiver stress.
That breadth informs a flexible approach that borrows techniques from several evidence-informed models. In sessions she blends skill-building with attention to how relationships and early attachment shape current struggles. She can help people learn concrete tools for managing strong emotions, improving communication, and breaking unhelpful patterns.
The work is collaborative and paced to each person’s readiness. Nicole sees people by telehealth only, consistent with insurance rules that guide her practice. She will discuss how often to meet and what to focus on during the first few appointments.
How Nicole’s approaches translate to online sessions
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps people notice difficult thoughts and feelings without getting stuck in them, then choose actions that match their values. It can be useful for anxiety, depression, and life changes where getting unstuck matters. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on identifying unhelpful thinking and learning skills to change behavior and mood; it often includes practical exercises to try between sessions. Attachment-Based Therapy looks at how early relationship patterns affect current connections and can help people improve trust, communication, and intimacy.Finding the best approach is part of the work together. Nicole will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what has or hasn’t helped in the past. She combines methods and adjusts the plan over time so the approach fits the client’s needs rather than forcing a single model.
Online therapy offers flexibility for people with busy schedules or mobility challenges. Video calls allow face-to-face interaction when visual cues matter. Phone sessions can be useful when bandwidth is limited or for shorter check-ins. While she does not offer messaging or phone-based clinical support due to insurance rules, telehealth video sessions let people attend weekly or bi-weekly meetings without travel, making it easier to maintain consistent care.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating disorders
- Family problems
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Midlife crisis
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sleeping disorders
- Somatization
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 23 years
- Licensed
- Pennsylvania, Virginia
- Languages
- English
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