About Susan
Susan Shafer is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC) and a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) with 15 years of experience. She practices from New Jersey and focuses on practical, down-to-earth support for common struggles like anxiety, depression, stress, and ADHD. She uses straightforward talk and hands-on strategies to help people feel less overwhelmed and more able to cope.
Her style centers on listening and building on each person's strengths.
Background and approach
She blends Client-Centered Therapy with cognitive tools from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and mindfulness practices. Sessions often include simple exercises to notice thoughts, manage emotions, and try new behaviors between meetings. Susan draws on techniques that teach concrete skills for everyday life.
That can mean practicing breathing and body-based awareness, working on clearer communication, or breaking big problems into smaller, manageable steps. She also uses motivational methods to help clients find reasons to change and keep moving forward. Her background includes a master’s degree in community counseling and long experience in varied settings.
Over 15 years she has supported people facing grief, trauma, relationship strains, parenting stress, career shifts, and mood concerns such as bipolar disorder. She brings practical tools rather than abstract theory. People who work with her can expect goal-focused sessions with room for compassion and real planning.
She helps clients set realistic next steps and checks in on progress. When someone is ready to begin, she guides them through the first scheduling steps and the early work of building momentum.
How practical approaches translate to online therapy
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on building a trusting relationship and listening closely to each person's concerns. In online sessions this means the therapist helps clients set the agenda and follows their lead while offering validation and practical next steps.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) teaches clear skills to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. Online CBT can include brief exercises, worksheets, and behavioral experiments to try between sessions, which work well over video or messaging when clients need step-by-step guidance.
Mindfulness Therapy brings simple attention and breathing practices into everyday life to reduce reactivity. These short practices can be coached in a video session, reinforced in text messages, or used as brief phone check-ins to help with stress, sleep, and emotional regulation.
Finding the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist collaborates with each client to choose methods that match their goals, lifestyle, and preferences. That partnership means trying approaches, checking what helps, and adjusting plans as needed.
Online formats offer flexibility to fit therapy into busy lives. Video calls allow face-to-face interaction for skill coaching, phone sessions work well when bandwidth is limited, live chat supports quick check-ins, and text-based messaging can keep momentum between meetings. These options make it easier to attend sessions, practice skills, and stay connected to progress without added travel.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Trauma and abuse
- Anger management
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Divorce and separation
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Life purpose
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 15 years
- Licensed
- North Carolina, New Jersey
- Languages
- English
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