About Rita
Rita Downs is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Oregon with 25 years of combined clinical and behavioral health experience. She emphasizes practical support for people facing stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, and other life challenges. Rita speaks plainly and focuses on clear steps that clients can try between sessions.
Her approach begins by listening and learning each person’s story. She treats clients as the experts on their lives and helps them use their strengths to handle problems.
Background and approach
Sessions tend to be straightforward and goal-oriented, with attention to what works day to day. Rita uses methods from cognitive behavioral therapy and solution-focused work to break big problems into manageable steps. She also draws on client-centered and motivational techniques to help people find momentum and make changes they actually want.
For those who have painful memories, she includes trauma-focused ideas to reduce the hold of those experiences. Over the years she has helped people with parenting stress, grief, anger, self-esteem, career transitions, ADHD, bipolar mood concerns, and coping with life changes. Rita also has experience with aging and caregiver stress, autism and Asperger concerns, blended family issues, and substance use challenges.
She offers sessions in English and provides video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. The first step is a short matching questionnaire to connect with a therapist and then schedule a time that fits.
How Rita’s approaches work online
Client-centered therapy focuses on listening and building on a person’s strengths. In practice this means conversations that help people decide their own goals and pace, which can be especially useful for anxiety and motivation problems.Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts and actions affect feelings. It breaks worries into parts and teaches simple skills to test and change unhelpful patterns, a good fit for anxiety, stress, and mood issues.
Motivational interviewing helps when someone feels stuck or ambivalent about change. It uses focused questions and reflections to strengthen a person’s own reasons for making adjustments, which can support work around addictions and behavior change.
Finding the right approach is part of the work together. Rita will talk with each person about goals, past attempts, and preferences, then try methods that match those needs. She checks in and adapts the plan as progress is made, keeping the process collaborative.
Online sessions are available by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to fit different days and schedules. Video sessions are like a face-to-face meeting, phone can be easier when bandwidth is low, live chat works for brief check-ins, and messaging lets people share updates between meetings. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent around work, caregiving, or travel.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Addictions
- Parenting issues
Also listed
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Grief
- Impulsivity
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- Oregon
- Languages
- English
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