About Deborah
Deborah "Debbie" Kirby is a licensed clinical social worker with 24 years of experience helping people navigate stress, anxiety, grief, career shifts, and major life changes. She blends clinical experience with coaching skills to support people who feel stuck or overwhelmed. Debbie practices from Oregon and offers sessions in English.
Debbie aims to make therapy a straightforward, nonjudgmental place to talk. She creates space for practical problem solving as well as emotional processing.
Background and approach
Sessions often focus on small, doable steps clients can try between meetings. Her approach combines methods that help people notice their thoughts, strengthen important relationships, and change unhelpful patterns. She draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to clarify values and take action.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps identify and shift thinking that fuels anxiety. Attachment-based ideas inform work on relational patterns and trust. Debbie also uses client-centered and dialectical behavior therapy techniques to build coping skills and emotional balance.
She brings coaching experience for clients addressing career goals, work stress, or transitions. Common topics she supports include parenting concerns, LGBT issues, trauma and abuse, compassion fatigue, eating concerns, and fertility or adoption-related stress. People who reach out can expect collaborative planning and practical tools.
The aim is to make therapy fit daily life so progress can continue between sessions. Those interested can begin by completing a short matching questionnaire and scheduling a first appointment.
Therapeutic approaches you can use online
Debbie commonly uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy when working with anxiety and life changes. ACT helps people clarify what matters to them and take actions that match those values, even when uncomfortable emotions are present. CBT focuses on spotting unhelpful thought patterns and testing new ways of thinking and behaving to reduce stress and anxiety.She also integrates attachment-based ideas to understand relationship patterns and how early bonds affect current trust and connection. Together these approaches give both short-term coping tools and longer-term changes in how people relate to themselves and others. Choosing the right mix is collaborative - the therapist and client decide together what methods fit the client’s goals, needs, and preferences.
Online therapy offers several practical benefits for this kind of work. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues, while phone sessions can be a good option when bandwidth is limited or a camera feels like too much. Live chat and text-based messaging provide shorter check-ins or a way to stay connected between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy schedule, continue momentum after a session, and try skills in real time.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Grief
- Career difficulties
Also listed
- Adoption and foster care
- Blended family issues
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Eating disorders
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 24 years
- Licensed
- Oregon
- Languages
- English
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