About Sonya
Sonya Drottar is a licensed clinical social worker with 25 years of practice in California. She focuses on helping people manage stress and anxiety and supports those facing parenting challenges and major life changes. She creates a calm, approachable tone in sessions so people feel heard and understood.
Sonya aims for straightforward conversations. She invites clients to talk about their thoughts and feelings without judgment. That often means breaking worries into concrete steps and practicing small skills between sessions.
Background and approach
Her work draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people notice unhelpful patterns and try different ways of responding. She also uses client-centered and mindfulness approaches that emphasize listening, self-compassion, and present-moment awareness. Over 25 years she has worked with many concerns including grief, trauma and abuse, relationship struggles, addiction, and chronic health challenges.
She also supports people dealing with compassion fatigue, caregiver stress, and career transitions. Sessions blend practical tools and steady listening. Sonya helps clients set realistic goals and tests simple changes together.
People who want a warm, pragmatic therapist for ongoing life stress and anxiety often find this approach useful.
Practical approaches for online care
Sonya uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help people notice their values and take small, meaningful steps even when anxiety is present. ACT focuses on what matters most and teaches simple ways to act toward those goals despite difficult thoughts or feelings. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is another main approach she uses to identify unhelpful thinking patterns and test new, effective behaviors through short experiments and homework.Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. Sonya works together with each person to match methods to their needs, goals, and preferences. She adjusts tools over time so the approach fits how someone likes to learn and change.
Online sessions are offered through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy more flexible. Video calls let people work face to face from different locations. Phone sessions can be an easier fit when bandwidth is limited or when being off camera helps someone focus. Live chat and text messaging are useful for brief check-ins, quick skill practice, or when scheduling a longer session is difficult.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Parenting issues
Also listed
- Addictions
- Attachment issues
- Blended family issues
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English
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