About Christy
Christy Alten is a Licensed Professional Mental Health Counselor and a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Iowa with more than 31 years of clinical experience. She offers calm, direct support for people facing anxiety, stress, addiction, depression, and major life transitions. Her work aims to help clients find practical ways to cope and move forward.
Christy uses a grounded, respectful approach in sessions. She draws on client-centered methods to follow a person's priorities and on cognitive behavioral techniques to identify unhelpful thoughts and try new responses.
Background and approach
She also uses elements of dialectical behavior therapy to teach skills for emotion regulation and distress tolerance. Her background includes many years working with adults and adolescents around substance use and mental health concerns. She has long experience supervising and mentoring other clinicians, and she brings that same clarity to individual sessions.
The tone is hopeful but realistic, combining spiritual perspective with evidence-informed tools when clients want that mix. Sessions are practical and goal-oriented. Christy helps people set manageable steps, practice new skills between meetings, and track small changes over time.
She can also support conversations about parenting stress, grief, career shifts, and relationship patterns rooted in family of origin. Communication is straightforward and nonjudgmental. Clients who want both talk therapy and skills practice will find a blend of listening, problem solving, and behavioral exercises.
Christy aims to help people feel less stuck and more able to handle daily demands.
Therapeutic approaches and online care that fit your life
Client-centered therapy focuses on the individual's goals and experience. A therapist using this approach listens carefully, follows the client's lead, and helps clarify what matters most. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, looks at the link between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and teaches practical skills to change unhelpful patterns. Dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, emphasizes emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness skills useful for strong emotions and repeated crises.Choosing the right approach is part of the work. Christy will collaborate with each person to decide which methods match their needs and goals. That means trying techniques, checking what helps, and adjusting the plan together rather than imposing one fixed method.
Online therapy gives flexibility for busy lives. Video calls let people meet face to face without travel. Phone sessions can be easier when video would interrupt work or bandwidth is limited. Live chat and text-based messaging are useful for shorter check-ins, skill practice, or times when writing feels easier than speaking. These options make it simpler to fit therapy into a day and to keep progress moving forward.
Questions people ask
What concerns does Christy help with?
What is her style in therapy?
How much experience does she have?
Where is she licensed and based?
Which languages are supported?
What session formats are available?
How does pricing work?
How do I begin working with her?
What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 31 years
- Licensed
- South Dakota, Iowa
- Languages
- English
We will earn a commission if you sign up through our link, at no cost to you.