About Chelsea
Dr. Chelsea Dumas helps people coping with stress, anxiety, addictions, trauma, depression, and relationship and family concerns. She is a clinical psychologist licensed in Michigan and Illinois and draws on over a decade of experience to guide practical steps toward feeling steadier.
Her style is warm and straightforward, and she focuses on goals that matter to each person. She combines client-centered care with cognitive-behavioral ideas and trauma-focused work. That means conversations begin with what you want to change.
Background and approach
Therapy looks at how thoughts, feelings, and actions link together, and then practices small changes that can ease symptoms like worry, low mood, or trouble sleeping. Dr. Dumas has particular experience with substance use and its ripple effects.
She has worked with people who are actively using, those trying to stop, and those in long-term recovery. She also helps people navigate family-of-origin issues, abandonment, guilt and shame, and problems that come with co-occurring conditions. Sessions often include skill practice, brief behavior experiments, and working through difficult memories when needed.
She uses motivational interviewing techniques to build determination for change and DBT-informed strategies for emotion regulation. Everything moves at a pace the client finds manageable. She offers care to people dealing with career stress, bipolar mood management, compassion fatigue, smoking or vaping cessation, and the fallout from sexual assault and abuse.
Dr. Dumas speaks English and provides services from her Michigan base. Her approach centers on collaboration, clear steps, and steady support.
Approaches that guide online care
Client-centered therapy focuses on listening and working at the client's pace. The therapist helps people set the goals they care about and follows their lead while offering empathy and practical suggestions. This approach is useful for building trust and staying focused on what matters to each person.Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts and behaviors keep problems going. Online CBT often includes simple exercises to try between sessions, such as tracking thoughts, testing beliefs, and changing small behaviors to reduce anxiety or depressive symptoms.
Dialectical behavior therapy, DBT, provides skills for regulating intense emotions and managing distress. Online DBT-style work teaches breathing and grounding exercises, emotion regulation strategies, and ways to improve relationships in day-to-day life.
Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will discuss goals, try different methods when needed, and adjust the plan based on what helps most. Clients and the therapist choose techniques together rather than following a one-size-fits-all path.
Online sessions are offered by licensed professionals through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. Video calls let people work face-to-face from wherever they are. Phone sessions can fit a break at work or require less bandwidth. Live chat and text messaging are useful for quick check-ins, ongoing support between sessions, and brief coaching when a full visit isn't possible.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Addictions
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Co-morbidity
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Guilt and shame
- Mood disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sleeping disorders
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 12 years
- Licensed
- Illinois, Michigan
- Languages
- English
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