About Darlene
Darlene Kelly is a licensed clinical social worker with 24 years of experience. She practices from a compassionate, patient-centered stance and helps people who are feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, stress, or major life changes. She listens without judgment and encourages clear, practical steps toward feeling more in control.
She uses conversational, goal-focused work to address problems like relationship strain, grief, addiction, mood changes, and low self-esteem. Sessions often include learning new coping skills, looking at patterns that cause distress, and trying small experiments to see what works.
Background and approach
She aims to help people notice values and move toward them, not to erase their past. Darlene draws on approaches such as acceptance and commitment strategies, attachment-focused work, cognitive behavior techniques, and emotional skills training. Those methods are used flexibly to match each person’s needs.
She also uses dialectical behavior ideas when emotions feel intense or reactions feel overwhelming. Her work is grounded in listening first, then building strategies together. Many of her clients appreciate short-term tools for specific problems and longer conversations about life changes and relationships.
She focuses on helping people speak their needs, set boundaries, and practice new ways of coping. Located in Louisiana, she offers therapy in English and is open to working with international clients. Darlene aims to make the process clear and manageable, helping people take steady steps toward healthier routines and more satisfying relationships.
Therapeutic approaches you can use online
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people notice difficult thoughts and feelings without getting stuck in them, then choose actions that match their values. It’s useful for anxiety, stress, and making steady changes when life feels overwhelming.Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on how early and current relationships shape reactions and safety in relationships. It can help with intimacy issues, trust, abandonment concerns, and patterns that keep repeating in relationships.
Finding the right approach is a team effort. The therapist will talk with the person about goals, worries, and what has or hasn’t helped before, then suggest methods to try. That collaborative process makes it easier to adjust techniques if something doesn’t fit.
Online therapy offers flexible ways to meet so people can fit sessions into work, caregiving, or travel. Video calls are good for a full session with face-to-face interaction. Phone sessions can work when bandwidth is low or when someone prefers not to be on camera. Live chat and text-based messaging are useful for quick check-ins, brief coaching, or steady support between sessions.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- LGBT
- Trauma and abuse
- Parenting issues
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- HIV / AIDS
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Stress, Anxiety
- Traumatic brain injury
- Trichotillomania
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Existential Therapy
- Gottman Method
- Imago Relationship Therapy
- Jungian Therapy
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Internal Family Systems
- Systemic Therapy
- Experience
- 24 years
- Licensed
- Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi
- Languages
- English
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