About Willow
Willow Wakeley-Smith is a licensed clinical social worker who focuses on practical help for everyday problems. She works with people dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, ADHD, parenting pressures, and struggles with motivation and confidence. Willow keeps sessions straightforward and respectful.
She listens first, then helps clients set clear goals. Plans change as life changes, so she adjusts approaches to match each person's needs and progress. Her background includes five years of clinical work with adults and more than ten years of professional experience working with children in schools.
Background and approach
That school experience gave her a close view of parenting challenges and how disability can affect family life. In therapy she often blends client-centered work with structured tools from cognitive behavioral therapy. She also uses mindfulness and motivational interviewing to help people notice patterns, try small changes, and build new habits that fit their daily routines.
Willow emphasizes real-world results. Sessions focus on what someone wants to accomplish at home, at work, or with parenting. She pays attention to practical steps that make a visible difference in day-to-day life.
People come to her for help with mood changes, sleep problems, relationship communication, obsessive thinking, impulsivity, grief, and managing life transitions. She aims to make therapy useful and usable between sessions.
Therapeutic approaches adapted for online care
Willow commonly uses client-centered therapy to build a respectful, collaborative relationship where the client sets priorities and the therapist listens and reflects. This approach helps people feel heard and shapes goals that matter in their daily life.She also uses cognitive behavioral therapy, which breaks problems into thoughts, behaviors, and feelings and teaches practical skills to change unhelpful patterns. CBT can help with anxiety, depression, sleep issues, impulsivity, and managing ADHD-related routines.
Finding the right mix of approaches is a collaborative process. Willow will work with each person to figure out which techniques match their goals and preferences, and she adjusts the plan as progress is made or circumstances change.
Online therapy gives useful flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and shared worksheets, phone sessions can be a good option when bandwidth is limited, live chat and text-based messaging offer shorter check-ins or ongoing prompts between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy schedules and keep momentum between meetings.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Parenting issues
- Bipolar disorder
Also listed
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Antisocial personality
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Hoarding
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Personality disorders
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 5 years
- Licensed
- Missouri
- Languages
- English
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