About Michelle
Michelle Bartnik is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Michigan who focuses on helping people manage stress and anxiety. She centers sessions on each person's story and strengths. Her style is direct and supportive for people facing parenting strain, family conflicts, grief, or big life changes.
Michelle uses clear, practical conversations to identify what matters most to each person. She helps clients notice patterns in thinking and relationships, and then try small changes that can make daily life easier.
Background and approach
Sessions aim to build coping skills for mood shifts, worry, and the fallout from trauma or loss. Her background includes nine years of clinical experience working with adults on issues such as depression, bipolar concerns, ADHD, and career stress. She also addresses attachment and adoption-related worries, blended family challenges, caregiver strain, and communication problems.
Michelle describes clients as having valuable knowledge about their own lives and works from that viewpoint. In a typical session she listens, reflects, and offers practical steps to test between-session changes. She draws from approaches like attachment-based work, client-centered listening, cognitive behavioral techniques, motivational interviewing, and narrative strategies.
The focus is on what the client wants to change and what fits their life. People who prefer straightforward, collaborative therapy often find her helpful. She supports those who want to reduce anxiety, improve relationships, and handle transitions with clearer choices and small, manageable goals.
Approach and online options that fit your life
Michelle uses attachment-based work to look at how early and current relationships shape reactions today; this helps when worry, abandonment fears, or family patterns make it hard to feel steady. She also uses client-centered listening that focuses on understanding a person’s experience and strengths before suggesting changes. Cognitive behavioral ideas are used to spot unhelpful thinking and test new behaviors that reduce anxiety and mood swings.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. She talks with each person about goals and preferences, then tries methods that match those needs. If something doesn’t fit, she adjusts the plan together so the work stays useful and realistic.
Online therapy offers flexibility for busy or geographically distant people. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues. Phone sessions work when bandwidth is limited or a shorter check-in is needed. Live chat and text-based messaging let people send quick updates, journal entries, or run brief problem-solving between sessions. These formats make it easier to keep therapy consistent while fitting work, parenting, and daily life.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Emptiness
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 9 years
- Licensed
- Michigan
- Languages
- English
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