About Barbara
Barbara Lefdal is a licensed professional counselor with a mental health endorsement (LPC-MH) and 30 years of clinical experience in South Dakota. She helps people who are dealing with stress, anxiety, grief, depression, and major life changes. Her style is steady and practical, aimed at helping someone feel more able to cope day to day.
Barbara focuses on common emotional struggles such as isolation, caregiver strain, guilt, shame, and problems with communication and control.
Background and approach
She also works with issues that often accompany aging, hospice and end-of-life concerns, and financial or role stress. These areas often overlap, and she treats them together rather than in isolation. Her approach blends client-centered work with cognitive behavioral strategies and mindfulness.
That means sessions often include listening and reflection, looking at unhelpful thought patterns, and trying small, practical skills. Motivational interviewing and psychodynamic ideas are also used to understand deeper patterns when useful. Barbara aims to build a calm, respectful space where people can talk about what matters most.
Sessions are paced to each person's needs, with an emphasis on practical steps and emotional understanding. She supports people as they sort through grief, rebuild after loss, manage ongoing mood concerns, and find clearer ways to communicate. Over three decades she has worked with a wide range of life stressors and multicultural needs.
Her practice welcomes conversations about complex histories, trauma, caregiving burdens, and the slow work of building resilience.
Making therapeutic approaches work online
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on listening and building a trusting relationship so people can speak openly about what matters. It helps with depression, grief, and feelings of isolation by centering the person's experience. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors connect and teaches practical skills to change unhelpful patterns, which is useful for anxiety and mood concerns. Mindfulness Therapy brings attention to the present moment through simple practices that reduce rumination and increase coping with stress.Finding the right approach is part of the work. Barbara will collaborate with each person to try methods that match their goals and preferences, adjusting pace and techniques as needed. The choice of methods is reviewed together and can change over time based on what helps most.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video calls allow a fuller face-to-face conversation, phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is low, live chat works for shorter check-ins, and messaging supports ongoing reflection between sessions. These options provide flexibility for busy schedules, caregiving demands, or when a quieter setting is preferred for talking.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Divorce and separation
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Post-traumatic stress
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 30 years
- Licensed
- South Dakota
- Languages
- English
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