About Benita
Benita Whitfield is a licensed clinical social worker who helps people facing stress, anxiety, relationship strain, parenting challenges, anger, and low self-esteem. She has worked in clinical settings for many years and aims to make therapy straightforward and practical for busy lives. Her approach is warm and person-centered.
Sessions focus on clear goals and steps people can use between meetings. She listens for patterns in relationships and coping, then suggests skills and small changes that fit each person’s life.
Background and approach
Whitfield draws on attachment-based ideas to look at how early relationships shape current connections. She also uses elements of dialectical behavior therapy to teach emotion regulation and mindfulness techniques to reduce overwhelm. Emotion-focused methods help when people need to address painful feelings in close relationships.
Over a 26-year career she has supported people through workplace stress, midlife changes, caregiving strain, and recovery from painful loss or abandonment. Her background includes work with adoption and foster care issues, attachment concerns, chronic illness, and communication problems. Clients can expect straightforward language, practical tools, and collaborative planning.
Benita holds LCSW (Illinois) and LICSW (Massachusetts) credentials and offers services from Illinois while working with people across different locations.
How therapeutic approaches translate to online care
Attachment-based work looks at how early bonds shape current relationships. In online sessions this means talking through patterns, identifying triggers, and practicing new ways of relating with partners or loved ones. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) focuses on emotion regulation and coping skills. Online DBT-style work often includes learning short grounding exercises, distress tolerance techniques, and ways to steady intense feelings. Mindfulness therapy teaches present-moment awareness and simple breathing or attention practices that reduce overwhelm and improve focus.Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the therapeutic process. The therapist will talk with each person about their goals and preferences and then collaborate on which methods to try. That plan can change as needs evolve, and decisions are made together rather than imposed.
Online formats offer practical flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face connection when visual cues matter. Phone sessions work well when bandwidth is limited or someone prefers no video. Live chat and text-based messaging can be used for brief check-ins, between-session coaching, or when a shorter exchange fits a busy day. These options make it easier to fit therapy into work, caregiving, or travel schedules while keeping the focus on skills and relationship change.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Parenting issues
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Visually impaired
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 26 years
- Licensed
- Massachusetts, Illinois
- Languages
- English