About Vanessa
Vanessa Smith is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Licensed Clinical Social Worker practicing in Louisiana. She brings six years of professional experience focused on common struggles like anxiety, stress, depression, and addiction. Vanessa keeps sessions warm and interactive and centers each conversation on the person in front of her.
Her style is person-centered and humanistic. She treats clients as the experts on their own lives and offers guidance rather than directives.
Background and approach
Sessions are aimed at helping people notice patterns, try new coping skills, and make meaningful changes. In practice she blends approaches that match what each person needs. She uses elements of cognitive behavioral work to identify unhelpful thoughts and behaviors.
Motivational interviewing supports people working through substance use and other habit changes. Vanessa also draws on dialectical behavior strategies to teach practical emotion regulation and interpersonal skills. Solution-focused techniques are used to set small, clear goals and track progress between sessions.
These methods are chosen to help with grief, parenting stress, relationship strain, compassion fatigue, and life transitions. She has additional focus on drug and alcohol addiction and on helping people clarify life purpose. People who want a collaborative therapist who listens closely and offers step-by-step tools may find her approach useful.
Therapeutic approaches you can use online
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on listening and understanding. It aims to give people space to tell their story and to explore what matters most to them. This approach helps when someone needs support making sense of strong emotions or big life decisions.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts and behaviors affect feelings. It teaches practical exercises to change unhelpful thinking and to build healthier habits. CBT can be useful for anxiety, depression, and stress management.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, provides concrete skills for regulating emotion and improving relationships. It includes techniques for handling distress and for communicating more effectively with others. These tools can help with intense mood swings, relationship conflict, and coping under pressure.
Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work. Vanessa will collaborate with each client to decide which methods fit their goals and preferences. Together they set small steps and adjust the plan as progress is made.
Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to increase flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face connection, phone sessions need less bandwidth, live chat is useful for short check-ins, and messaging supports ongoing reflection between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy lives and to continue care when routines change.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Bipolar disorder
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family conflicts
- Life purpose
- Parenting issues
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Trauma and abuse
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 6 years
- Licensed
- Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas
- Languages
- English
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