About Venessa
Venessa Ellington Alston is a licensed clinical social worker with three decades of experience. She helps people who are feeling overwhelmed by stress, wrestling with anxiety, or struggling with addictions. Her approach is respectful and compassionate, focused on practical steps you can use day to day.
Venessa adapts conversations and plans to fit each person's situation. She pays attention to motivation, anger, self-esteem, and confidence so sessions stay relevant and useful.
Background and approach
She also works with concerns like codependency, substance use, process addictions, and smoking or vaping cessation. People bring many kinds of pain into therapy, including grief, guilt, shame, or symptoms after trauma. Venessa meets those concerns with steady support and a focus on what moves life forward.
She also helps with issues common in midlife, postpartum depression, social anxiety, and women's health topics. Her practice centers on clear goals and small, manageable steps. Conversations aim to increase coping skills and improve day-to-day functioning.
She will collaborate with each person to shape a plan they can follow between sessions. Venessa works with English-speaking clients from Colorado and accepts international clients. With a long career behind her, she brings practical experience and a calm presence to help people through difficult times.
Evidence-based approaches and online care
Venessa draws on well-established, evidence-based therapeutic techniques that focus on practical coping skills and behavior change. One common approach she uses emphasizes building manageable daily skills to reduce anxiety and improve mood; this helps people handle stress in the moment and develop healthier routines. Another approach centers on addressing addictive patterns by breaking problems into small steps, learning triggers, and creating alternatives to harmful behaviors so recovery becomes more achievable.Finding the right approach is part of the work together. She will collaborate with each person to identify goals, try techniques, and adjust methods based on what is most helpful. Clients and therapist shape the plan together so it fits needs and preferences.
Online therapy with Venessa is offered via video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to suit different schedules and communication styles. Video is useful for fuller conversations and nonverbal cues, phone calls work well when bandwidth is limited, live chat allows short check-ins, and messaging supports ongoing reflection between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life and keep momentum as progress happens.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Addictions
- Anger management
Also listed
- Codependency
- Depression
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Midlife crisis
- Multicultural concerns
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
- Experience
- 30 years
- Licensed
- Colorado
- Languages
- English
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