About Susan
Susan Trefts, LCSW, LICSW, focuses on helping people manage anxiety and stress in everyday life. She speaks plainly and aims to make the first step feel doable. Her style centers on listening and building on each person’s strengths so they can move toward clearer goals.
Susan believes people are the experts in their own stories. She helps them name what feels hard and tries out small, practical steps to ease symptoms.
Background and approach
Conversations focus on what matters now and what can change in real life situations. With 21 years of professional experience, Susan draws on approaches that emphasize respect and active skills building. She uses Client-Centered Therapy to keep sessions grounded in the client's priorities.
She also incorporates techniques from Dialectical Behavior Therapy to teach emotion regulation and coping strategies. Typical sessions include talking through current stressors, practicing specific skills, and setting brief, reachable goals between meetings. She supports people facing trauma, grief, self-esteem concerns, compassion fatigue, body image and related issues.
The work is collaborative and paced to each person’s comfort. Susan is licensed in Oregon and Washington and offers services in English. She aims to help people regain steadier daily functioning and more satisfying self-connection through steady, practical work.
How client-centered and DBT approaches work online
Susan uses Client-Centered Therapy to keep sessions focused on what the client finds most important. This approach means the therapist listens closely, reflects what she hears, and follows the client's lead to set goals that feel meaningful and doable.She also brings techniques from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which offers concrete skills for managing intense emotions, improving distress tolerance, and refining interpersonal effectiveness. DBT skills can be practiced together in sessions and applied between meetings to handle anxiety, stress, and trauma-related symptoms.
Finding the right approach is part of the process. Susan collaborates with each person to choose methods that match their needs and comfort. Goals, pacing, and skill work are adjusted over time so the plan stays useful and realistic.
Online sessions make regular work easier to fit into busy lives. Video calls let people see visual cues and practice skills in real time. Phone sessions offer a simpler option when bandwidth is limited. Live chat or text-based messaging can be useful for shorter check-ins, skill reminders, or when someone prefers not to be on camera. These formats expand flexibility so therapy can continue between appointments and around daily demands.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
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Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 21 years
- Licensed
- Washington, Oregon
- Languages
- English
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