About Leah
Leah Shanks is a licensed professional counselor with 15 years of experience in Tennessee. She focuses on supporting people who feel overwhelmed by anxiety, stress, grief, loss, and life changes. Leah centers the conversation on each person's experience and strengths.
She believes the first step toward change takes courage and offers steady support along the way. Leah works in a straightforward, respectful way. She listens first, then helps people set practical goals.
Background and approach
Sessions are conversational and goal-oriented, with tools introduced as they become useful. Clients often work on managing panic, mood shifts, body-image worries, and eating and food-related concerns. Her background includes trauma-informed approaches and mind-body work.
She uses methods that help people process past hurt and reduce the physical tension that accompanies anxiety. Treatment can include short skill-building exercises, grounding practices, and guided exploration of difficult memories. Leah also draws on cognitive techniques to spot and change upsetting thoughts.
Those strategies are paired with mindfulness and somatic practices when helpful. This mix aims to reduce symptoms and build day-to-day coping skills. People who seek Leah's help are often facing parenting stress, compassion fatigue, or relationship strain.
She also supports those dealing with pregnancy and childbirth concerns, impulsivity, self-harm thoughts, and social anxiety. Sessions are offered in English and held according to the therapist's Tennessee practice.
Approaches that guide online sessions
Leah combines client-centered work with cognitive behavioral techniques to help people feel more in control of anxiety and daily stress. Client-centered Therapy focuses on listening, empathy, and building on a person's strengths to set goals and make changes. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) teaches how thoughts, behaviors, and feelings interact and offers practical exercises to shift unhelpful patterns.She also uses elements of EMDR when past trauma is a central concern, using structured processing to help reduce the emotional intensity of painful memories. EMDR can be useful for people struggling with post-traumatic stress or lingering reactions to past events.
Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work. Leah will talk with each person about their needs, goals, and preferences and then suggest steps to try. That collaborative process helps decide whether to emphasize CBT skills, mindfulness, somatic practices, or trauma-focused work.
Online therapy offers flexible ways to connect: video calls for deeper conversation, phone sessions when bandwidth is limited, live chat for brief check-ins, and text messaging for ongoing support between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life and to use the kind of contact that feels most helpful on any given day.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Trauma and abuse
- Eating disorders
Also listed
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Body image
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Eating and food-related issues
- Family conflicts
- Grief
- Impulsivity
- Mood disorders
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Social anxiety and phobia
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 15 years
- Licensed
- Tennessee
- Languages
- English
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