About Donna
Donna Smith is a licensed mental health counselor with 35 years of experience. She works with people facing stress, anxiety, grief, depression, addictions, and relationship concerns. Donna aims to help people improve daily functioning and feel more like themselves again.
Donna offers calm, straightforward guidance in session. She uses a mix of approaches that focus on values, practical skills, and emotional connection. Her style is collaborative - she treats each person as the expert on their life and helps them build workable steps forward.
Background and approach
Her background includes graduate-level counselor training from the University of Rochester and decades in varied mental health settings in New York. That long experience shapes an approach that balances structure with warm listening. Donna also brings a creative sensibility to her work and often draws on writing and reflection to deepen insight.
Sessions emphasize clear goals, manageable tools, and attention to what matters most to the client. She supports people coping with trauma and abuse, intimacy and sexual identity concerns, parenting strain, anger, ADHD, and challenges like codependency or attachment wounds. The work can include practical behavior changes, emotion-focused conversations, and mindfulness practices.
People who choose Donna can expect a steady, encouraging presence and a partnership aimed at practical progress. She describes herself as a guide who walks alongside clients while they make changes and imagine new possibilities.
Therapeutic approaches and online care
Donna commonly uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Client-Centered Therapy in her work. ACT focuses on clarifying values and taking committed steps toward them while accepting difficult feelings, which can help with anxiety and life transitions. Client-Centered Therapy emphasizes a respectful, nonjudgmental relationship where the client leads the pace and focus of change.She also draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy when practical skills are needed to change unhelpful thought and behavior patterns. CBT breaks problems into manageable parts and teaches concrete techniques for reducing symptoms and improving daily routines. Together these approaches let a therapist tailor sessions to what each person needs and prefers.
Finding the right approach is part of the process and the therapist will work collaboratively to figure out what fits best. Goals, personal values, and how someone likes to work guide the choice of methods so sessions feel useful and realistic.
Online therapy offers flexibility through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video is useful for full sessions and face-to-face interaction, phone works well when bandwidth is limited, chat can be a quick check-in, and messaging supports brief reflections between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy schedules and to continue work consistently over time.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- LGBT
- Relationship issues
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Divorce and separation
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 35 years
- Licensed
- New York
- Languages
- English
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