About Donna
Donna Altepeter is a licensed clinical social worker who focuses on helping people cope with stress, anxiety, depression, grief, and life transitions. She meets people where they are and works alongside them to find practical next steps. Her style is warm and collaborative, and she believes people are the experts on their own lives.
Donna draws on a client-centered stance that centers a person’s priorities in each session. She mixes that with cognitive behavioral ideas to identify unhelpful thoughts and try new behaviors.
Background and approach
Mindfulness and motivational techniques also appear in her work to help people settle intense feelings and find motivation for change. Donna has extensive experience across medical, bereavement, and caregiving settings. That background informs how she talks about illness, loss, caregiving stress, and end-of-life concerns.
She has worked with people facing addiction, attachment struggles, and major life changes, and she brings that practical experience into sessions. She taught social work at the University of Wisconsin for more than 20 years, and she uses teaching moments to clarify tools and skills. Clients can expect clear explanations, guided practice, and collaborative problem solving rather than jargon or long lectures.
Donna has practiced social work for many years and holds a Wisconsin LCSW. She offers video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to make work with her flexible and manageable for busy lives.
Practical approaches for online therapy and coping skills
Donna uses client-centered work to center what you want to address and to shape each session around your priorities. This approach means sessions focus on your goals, your values, and what feels most useful in the moment.She also uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help identify patterns of thought and behavior that keep problems going. CBT gives simple tools to test unhelpful beliefs and try new actions, which can be useful for anxiety, mood problems, sleep, and everyday stress. Mindfulness Therapy appears as brief practices and attention skills to reduce reactivity and increase calm during hard moments. These practices are taught in short, practical ways that you can use between sessions.
Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work together. The therapist will talk with you about goals, try approaches, and adapt methods based on what helps. That collaborative process means adjustments are normal and expected.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to provide flexibility. Video calls support more face-to-face conversation and teaching of skills. Phone sessions can fit a shorter break or lower bandwidth situations. Live chat and text messaging work well for quick check-ins, brief coaching, or ongoing encouragement between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life while using practical techniques that can be practiced in daily routines.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Addictions
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Divorce and separation
- Family conflicts
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 12 years
- Licensed
- Wisconsin
- Languages
- English
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