About Paula
Paula Steele is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with 15 years of experience in mental health care. She works from Maine and focuses on helping people manage stress and anxiety while juggling daily responsibilities. Her background includes years of direct clinical work with adults facing depression, trauma, addiction, and parenting stress.
Paula uses a client-centered approach that puts the person's needs first. She emphasizes building a trusting relationship and listens without judgment.
Background and approach
Sessions often include practical skills like mindfulness, breathing, and simple behavioral strategies to help reduce overwhelm. Her work also draws on cognitive behavioral therapy to address unhelpful thinking patterns and narrative therapy to help people reframe stressful stories about themselves. Motivational interviewing is used when people want to make concrete changes, such as cutting back on substances or improving sleep habits.
Paula has experience supporting people dealing with ADHD, autism and Asperger syndrome, grief, panic attacks, postpartum depression, and relationship or family problems. She pays special attention to caregiver stress and communication difficulties that complicate everyday life. In sessions she focuses on small, doable steps.
That can mean setting short goals, practicing new skills between meetings, or working through a plan for a tough conversation. The emphasis is on what helps in daily life, rather than long lists of theory. People who come to Paula often want clear tools for anxiety, better sleep, relief from anger or sadness, and help managing parenting demands.
She aims to work collaboratively to find approaches that fit each person’s situation.
Approaches that translate well to online care
Client-centered therapy focuses on understanding each person's experience and goals. It means the therapist listens closely and shapes sessions around what matters most to the client, which helps when managing anxiety or parenting stress.Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, teaches simple tools to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. It is useful for anxiety, panic attacks, sleep issues, and mood concerns because clients can practice techniques between sessions and report back during online meetings.
Mindfulness therapy offers easy practices for calming the body and mind, like brief breathing or grounding exercises. These tools can reduce moment-to-moment worry and be practiced during the week between appointments.
Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with the client to choose or combine methods based on needs, goals, and preferences. That might mean starting with skill-building, then trying narrative work to reframe a difficult story, or using motivational strategies to support behavior change.
Online therapy provides flexibility for busy schedules. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation, phone sessions work when bandwidth is limited, and live chat or text messaging can fit short check-ins or quick skill practice. These formats make it easier to keep therapy consistent despite work, parenting, or travel demands.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Parenting issues
- Depression
Also listed
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Bipolar disorder
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- LGBT
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 15 years
- Licensed
- Maine
- Languages
- English
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