About Cristina
Cristina Spataro is a New York State licensed mental health counselor with 18 years of experience helping people manage stress and anxiety. She works with clients facing relationship strain, career uncertainty, grief, trauma, addiction, and other life changes. Her approach aims to make daily life feel more manageable and less overwhelming.
Cristina focuses on practical conversations that clarify choices and next steps. She listens first, then helps people spot patterns that keep them stuck.
Background and approach
Sessions are grounded in everyday language and actions rather than clinical jargon. She uses client-centered methods to follow each person's goals and pace. That means the client sets priorities and the counselor adjusts to those needs.
Cristina also brings tools from cognitive behavioral therapy to identify unhelpful thoughts and try alternative ways of thinking and behaving. Many clients come with worries about parenting, family problems, workplace stress, or identity-related concerns. Cristina also supports people dealing with abandonment, adoption and foster care issues, caregiver strain, and midlife questions.
She pays attention to both immediate problems and longer-term patterns. Conversations often include short, actionable steps to try between sessions. Cristina helps clients track what works and what doesn't, then adjusts the plan.
Her goal is to help people find clearer direction and more control over everyday challenges.
How Cristina Uses Client-Centered and CBT Online
Client-centered therapy focuses on the person's goals and experience. The therapist follows the client's lead, asks open questions, and helps people clarify what they want to change. This approach is useful for relationship worries, life transitions, and figuring out priorities.Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, teaches practical skills to notice and change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. It often includes small experiments or exercises between sessions and can help with anxiety, depression, and coping with stress.
Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. Cristina will talk with the client about goals, try methods that fit their preferences, and adjust over time if something isn't working. The therapist and client decide together which tools to use.
Online sessions make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation, phone sessions can be a simpler option if bandwidth is limited, and live chat or text messaging works well for brief check-ins or people who prefer writing. These formats offer flexibility for scheduling, shorter check-ins during a work break, and easier access when travel or distance would otherwise be a barrier.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Family problems
- Grief
- Intimacy-related issues
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Parenting issues
- Self esteem
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 18 years
- Licensed
- New York
- Languages
- English
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