About Holly
Holly Gardenier is a licensed professional counselor who helps people navigate anxiety, grief, trauma, addiction, and major life changes. She writes plainly and listens closely to understand what feels most urgent. The focus is practical - calming intense emotions, sorting through painful memories, and finding clearer choices for day-to-day life.
Holly brings 35 years of experience to clinical work in Wisconsin. She draws on approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT), existential ideas, and client-centered methods.
Background and approach
Sessions often include mindfulness practices and tools for managing stress and strong emotions. Therapy with Holly emphasizes identifying values and small, doable steps toward them. She helps people notice patterns that keep them stuck and then experiments with different ways to respond.
That can mean practicing emotion regulation skills, testing new behaviors, or working through memories that still cause pain. Holly also supports people dealing with eating and substance concerns, intimacy questions, bipolar mood challenges, and issues tied to family of origin or attachment wounds. She uses a steady, exploratory style to help people understand why certain reactions persist and how to shift them.
Her approach balances direct skill-building with deeper reflection. Clients can expect a calm, patient presence plus practical strategies to try between sessions. Holly welcomes people who want a thoughtful, experience-informed guide through difficult moments.
How therapeutic approaches shape online work
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps people clarify what matters to them and take small steps toward those values even when anxiety or pain is present. It pairs practical exercises with learning to notice thoughts and feelings without getting ruled by them. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) teaches concrete skills for managing intense emotions, improving distress tolerance, and communicating more effectively in relationships. These skills are helpful when stress, anger, or mood swings get in the way of daily life. Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) focuses on understanding and reshaping emotional responses in close relationships, helping people connect more deeply and repair patterns that cause isolation or conflict.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Holly will work together with each person to match methods to their goals, needs, and pace. Sessions can blend skills training, mindfulness practice, and deeper emotional work as those choices make sense for the individual.
Online therapy offers flexible ways to meet. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues. Phone sessions can be easier when a video link is not practical. Live chat and text-based messaging are useful for brief check-ins, sharing progress, or working through shorter exercises between appointments. These options make it possible to fit therapy into a busy life and to use formats that suit the moment.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Stress, Anxiety
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Existential Therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 35 years
- Licensed
- Wisconsin
- Languages
- English
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