About Gayle
Gayle Bradley-Starkes is a licensed clinician with decades of hands-on experience helping people with anxiety and stress. She combines a respectful, person-focused style with practical listening to help people move past what is holding them back. She keeps sessions simple and direct.
Gayle listens for a person’s strengths and builds on them. She helps people name worries, sort relationship problems, and find ways to sleep and feel better. She also supports work on grief, anger, addiction issues, intimacy concerns, and attention or mood challenges.
Background and approach
In her work she uses Client-Centered Therapy to follow each person’s pace and priorities. She also uses Mindfulness Therapy to teach breathing, grounding, and present-moment skills. Those approaches are applied in plain language so people can try new strategies between sessions.
Gayle has worked in the mental health field for many years and brings long experience to common life problems. She draws on that experience when talking through complex family histories, adoption and foster care concerns, caregiver stress, and issues around commitment and communication. Sessions are offered in English for people living in Maryland.
She aims to create an encouraging space where a person can test new ways of coping, repair relationships, and build more steady everyday routines.
Client-centered and mindfulness approaches for online care
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on the person’s own goals and experience. The therapist listens without judgment and helps people follow their priorities, which can be useful for anxiety, relationship concerns, and self-esteem work.Mindfulness Therapy teaches simple practices like breathing and grounding to reduce reactivity and increase calm. These skills can help with worry, sleep problems, and stress management by offering short, usable tools to try between sessions.
Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will work with each person to decide which methods fit their needs and goals, and will adjust strategies as progress is made.
Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make scheduling easier. Video is useful for longer conversations and guided practices, phone works well for a focused check-in when bandwidth is limited, and messaging can support brief coaching, ongoing check-ins, or when written reflection feels helpful. These options give practical flexibility for people balancing work, caregiving, or other commitments.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Grief
Also listed
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Postpartum depression
- Self esteem
- Sleeping disorders
- Trauma and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 27 years
- Licensed
- Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia
- Languages
- English
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