About Holly
Holly Starr is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 25 years of experience helping people manage stress, anxiety, grief, depression, and relationship strain. She describes herself as an intuitive listener who pays close attention to patterns in feeling and behavior. Holly offers straightforward, steady support for people facing big life transitions or persistent inner conflict.
She trained in Clinical Psychology after earning a BA in English Literature and has worked in residential programs and independent practice.
Background and approach
Early roles on a suicide prevention hotline and as a grief therapist and supervisor shaped her approach to loss, mourning, and suicidal despair. That background informs how she responds to intense emotions and sudden change. In sessions she encourages curiosity about feelings and the stories people tell themselves.
Conversations may move between exploring painful memories and noticing current thought patterns. She often uses practical steps drawn from cognitive and solution-focused methods to test small experiments that can ease distress. Holly also draws on attachment and psychodynamic ideas to help people understand recurring relationship problems and deeper sources of shame or low self-esteem.
She is comfortable working with dissociation, codependency, and caregiver stress, and with issues tied to fertility, postpartum depression, or aging. Therapy is offered in both live talk formats and written online formats. Sessions aim to be collaborative and paced to each person’s needs so practical change can emerge alongside greater self-understanding.
How therapeutic approaches work online
Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on patterns in close relationships and helps people notice how early bonds shape current fears and reactions; it can be useful for anxiety, intimacy-related issues, and attachment concerns. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) looks at thoughts and behaviors together, teaching practical tools to interrupt anxious thinking and test new ways of coping. Psychodynamic Therapy pays attention to recurring emotional themes and unconscious patterns, offering space to connect current struggles to past experiences and family of origin issues.Finding the right approach is often a process. The therapist will work collaboratively to identify which ideas and techniques fit a person’s goals, needs, and preferences. That may mean starting with practical CBT experiments, then shifting to attachment or psychodynamic work when deeper patterns emerge.
Online therapy offers flexibility for different rhythms of life. Video calls let people talk face-to-face when deeper conversation is needed. Phone sessions use less bandwidth and can be easier to fit into a work break. Live chat and text-based messaging make shorter check-ins possible and allow written reflection between sessions. These options help people keep therapy going even when schedules or travel make in-person visits hard.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Grief
Also listed
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Attachment issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Fertility issues
- Guilt and shame
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Postpartum depression
- Self esteem
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English
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