About Paula
Paula Donovan is a licensed clinical social worker with 20 years of practice. She brings a calm, direct manner and a global perspective to sessions. Her work focuses on helping people manage stress and anxiety and get unstuck during major life changes.
Clients meet someone who listens without judgment and who treats their experience as the starting point. Paula believes people are the experts on their own lives and uses what they already know to build clearer next steps.
Background and approach
She draws on practical techniques to reduce distress and restore energy. Her approach mixes client-centered conversation with tools from cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy. She also uses mindfulness and motivational interviewing to help people notice patterns and try different habits.
The goal is to strengthen coping skills and improve day-to-day functioning. Paula has worked in international and U.S. settings, including earlier work at the World Bank before retraining as a clinician. That background shapes her comfort with multicultural concerns and life transitions tied to career, relocation, and loss.
She is based in Virginia and holds the LCSW credential. Typical issues she addresses include relationship strain, grief, addictions, depression, self-esteem challenges, sleep and eating concerns, and caregiver stress. Sessions are grounded and often practical, with attention to small changes that produce steady results.
Paula aims to create a trusting space where people can speak plainly about hard things, find clearer perspective, and try manageable steps toward greater balance.
How Paula’s approaches translate to online therapy
Paula uses client-centered therapy to focus on what matters most to each person. That means sessions begin with listening and understanding the client’s goals, then shaping the work around those priorities. This approach helps with relationship stress, grief, and finding direction.She also uses cognitive behavioral therapy, which looks at how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors interact. CBT offers practical exercises to reduce anxiety, improve sleep, and change unhelpful habits. Dialectical behavior therapy techniques are used to teach emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness for those feeling overwhelmed.
Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. Paula will talk with clients about their needs, try methods that fit, and adjust as progress is made. She emphasizes clear goals and small steps so people can see change between sessions.
Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone appointments, live chat, or text-based messaging to fit different schedules. Video is useful for deeper conversation, phone can be a simpler check-in, and messaging supports brief updates or ongoing coaching. These options make it easier to keep continuity across work, caregiving, or travel while working on anxiety, stress, and life transitions.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Grief
Also listed
- Addictions
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating disorders
- Family conflicts
- Fertility issues
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- Virginia
- Languages
- English
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