About Susan
Susan Schwerd, MD, LCPC, offers practical help for people facing stress, anxiety, trauma, depression, and related concerns. She writes plainly and focuses on clear steps that make daily life easier. Her style blends talk therapy with targeted techniques to reduce symptoms and improve coping.
She brings 24 years of experience in clinical and workplace settings. Before independent practice she held leadership roles in outpatient mental health care and spent a decade as a human resources director.
Background and approach
That mix informs a straightforward, coaching-minded approach to personal and professional problems. Her work is rooted in psychodynamic ideas but remains active and goal-oriented. Sessions aim to uncover patterns that keep someone stuck and then test new ways of responding.
She uses Solution-Focused Therapy to set concrete goals and Hypnotherapy to teach breathing and self-hypnosis for anxiety and chronic pain. Sessions may include breathing exercises, brief hypnosis, and talk interventions that target behavior and mood. She also integrates techniques drawn from cognitive and Adlerian methods when those match a person’s needs.
The emphasis is on practical changes that fit each client’s life. Online and phone work are part of her practice, and she provides some between-session messaging. People can expect a collaborative process that balances exploration with hands-on skills for stress, sleep trouble, grief, anger, and career challenges.
Approaches that translate well to online care
Psychodynamic Therapy uses conversation to identify old patterns that affect current feelings and reactions. Online sessions let someone reflect on how past experiences shape present stress, anxiety, and relationships. Hypnotherapy teaches breathing and self-hypnosis methods to reduce anxiety and manage chronic pain; these techniques can be guided effectively over video or phone. Solution-Focused Therapy centers on small, achievable changes and clear goals that a person can try between sessions to see quick results.Finding the right approach is part of the process, and the therapist will work collaboratively to choose methods that fit each person’s needs and preferences. Together they set goals, try techniques, and adjust the plan when something is not helping. The aim is to match practical tools with insight so progress feels meaningful.
Online therapy in this practice is offered by video calls and phone sessions, and the therapist will respond to a few messages between appointments. Video is useful when visual cues help the work, phone can be easier when bandwidth is limited, and short messaging can support brief check-ins. These options add flexibility for fitting sessions around work, caregiving, or medical care needs.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Also listed
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Family conflicts
- Grief
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Sleeping disorders
- Traumatic brain injury
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 24 years
- Licensed
- Maryland
- Languages
- English
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