About Penelope
Penelope Surber is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with eight years of experience helping adults move through anxiety, stress, addictions, depression, and trauma. She practices in Florida and focuses on building a respectful, empathetic working relationship with each person. Her style is warm and interactive, and she avoids stigmatizing labels.
Before obtaining her Florida LMHC, she spent six years working as an adult trauma therapist at a recovery center. That experience involved supporting people facing a wide range of concerns, including attachment and abandonment issues, low self-esteem, domestic violence, and coping after disasters or loss.
Background and approach
Penelope uses a mix of approaches to fit each person’s needs. She draws from Client-Centered Therapy to keep the person’s goals central. She uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors.
She also employs Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills to teach emotion regulation and distress tolerance. Sessions focus on practical steps and honest conversation. Penelope helps people understand patterns that keep them stuck and practices new ways of responding.
She works with issues like codependency, communication problems, dissociation, caregiver stress, and first responder concerns. Her approach blends evidence-informed techniques with a human touch. Penelope aims to support growth, stronger coping, and clearer decision making.
She invites people ready to take steps toward change to begin a collaborative process.
How therapeutic approaches translate to online care
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on the person's perspective and goals, offering a nonjudgmental space to talk and make choices. It helps when someone needs support processing feelings, building confidence, or clarifying values.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps identify and change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. It is practical and work-focused, often including short exercises between sessions to practice new skills for anxiety or depression.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) emphasizes emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. It teaches concrete skills that can reduce overwhelm and improve how someone handles strong emotions.
Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will discuss client goals, preferences, and needs and then propose methods to try. Plans are adjusted over time based on what helps most.
Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to provide flexibility. Video is good for deeper, conversational work while phone can fit into a short break. Live chat and text messaging are useful for quick check-ins, skill coaching, or when someone prefers written communication. These options make it easier to work therapy into a busy life and to keep continuity when travel or scheduling changes occur.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Attachment issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 8 years
- Licensed
- Florida
- Languages
- English
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