About Shirley
Shirley Colee is a licensed mental health counselor with two decades of professional experience. She focuses on helping people who are feeling stressed, anxious, overwhelmed by grief, or struggling with relationship and family issues. Her approach is straightforward and respectful, aimed at making the first steps feel manageable for someone worried about starting therapy.
Shirley adapts conversations and plans to fit each person she meets. She uses methods that help with changing unhelpful thoughts, building coping skills, and processing painful memories.
Background and approach
Sessions are conversational and practical, with clear steps you can try between meetings. She has worked with people facing trauma and abuse, addiction and eating concerns, and those coping with major life changes. Shirley also addresses issues like low self-esteem, anger, intimacy worries, and caregiver stress.
Her experience includes helping folks navigate career strain, parenting challenges, and the emotional effects of aging. Shirley brings patience and sensitivity to sessions. She listens first, then helps outline goals and small experiments to try.
The work can include skill practice, exploring difficult feelings, and ways to improve communication in important relationships. Many clients find it useful that Shirley matches the pace to what feels safe and doable. She encourages people to take manageable steps, whether that means skill practice, reflection, or targeted interventions.
Her background in counseling supports a flexible, person-focused process.
How Shirley uses practical approaches online
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on listening and responding to what matters most to the person in front of her. It helps people who need a space to be heard and to clarify their own goals. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at the links between thoughts, feelings, and actions and offers specific exercises to shift unhelpful patterns; it is often used for anxiety, depression, and stress. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, adds skills for managing intense emotions and improving interpersonal effectiveness, which can help with anger, impulsivity, and relationship strain.Shirley views finding the right approach as a collaborative process. She will talk with each person about their concerns, try methods that fit their goals, and adjust the plan as progress or challenges emerge. The aim is to pick strategies that feel useful and realistic for day-to-day life.
Offering video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging lets people choose what works best for them. Video is useful for face-to-face conversation and skill teaching, phone sessions can fit a short break during the day, and chat or messaging can support quick check-ins or written reflection. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent around work, caregiving, and travel.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Stress, Anxiety
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Existential Therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Gottman Method
- Imago Relationship Therapy
- Jungian Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Internal Family Systems
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- Florida
- Languages
- English
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