About Kristi
Dr. Kristi Hottenstein is a licensed professional counselor who has practiced in Michigan for two decades. She holds a doctorate in higher education administration and a master’s degree in counseling.
Dr. Hottenstein blends counseling and coaching to help people navigate stress, anxiety, life transitions, and relationship concerns. She meets each person where they are and builds a plan around their needs.
Sessions focus on practical skills, clearer self-understanding, and steps a person can take between meetings.
Background and approach
She draws on different methods to match the person, not a single fixed approach. Dr. Hottenstein often uses acceptance and commitment ideas to help people clarify values and move toward meaningful action.
She also uses cognitive behavioral tools to identify and shift thought patterns that contribute to anxiety and low mood. Dialectical skills are brought in when emotion regulation and distress tolerance are priorities. Her experience includes work with grief, trauma and abuse, addiction concerns, self-esteem and body image struggles, and issues around intimacy and sexuality including LGBT matters.
She also supports people facing caregiving stress, chronic illness, career transitions, and parenting challenges. Clients can expect a collaborative style that encourages self-awareness and personal responsibility. Dr.
Hottenstein pairs concrete exercises with open conversation so people leave sessions with clear next steps. She practices as an LPC and LPCC in Michigan and provides sessions in English.
Therapeutic approaches and online care
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people clarify what matters most and take action toward those values even when anxiety or difficult feelings are present. It can be helpful for stress, anxiety, and life transitions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on identifying unhelpful thought patterns and testing them with real-world experiments to reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms. Client-Centered Therapy emphasizes listening, empathy, and building understanding so a person feels heard and can explore choices at their own pace.Finding the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will collaborate with each person to pick methods that match their goals, preferences, and the problems they want to address. Plans are adjusted over time based on what helps most.
Online options include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to fit different schedules and needs. Video is useful for in-depth work when visual cues matter. Phone sessions can be a good option when bandwidth is limited or for a focused check-in. Live chat and messaging offer brief, flexible touchpoints between sessions or when written reflection helps. These formats help people access therapy with more convenience and flexibility.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- Michigan, Texas, Arizona, California, New Jersey, Virginia
- Languages
- English
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