About Catherine
Catherine McLaughlin greets people with a direct and compassionate approach. She is a licensed clinical social worker - LCSW - with 23 years of experience and she keeps things straightforward. She aims to make conversations feel calm and useful for everyday problems.
Catherine focuses on issues like stress, anxiety, grief, depression, addictions, low self-esteem, and relationship and intimacy concerns. She also helps people facing life changes, caregiver strain, codependency, and problems with communication.
Background and approach
Her background includes work with substance use cases and roles in New York practice settings. Her style is both warm and candid. She blends client-centered listening with practical tools from cognitive behavioral work and gentle exploration of personal history.
Mindfulness and motivational techniques are part of the way she helps people notice patterns and try new responses. Sessions tend to begin where each person actually is, not where a textbook says they should be. Catherine uses short, clear goals and small steps to build confidence and reduce overwhelm.
She includes discussion of coping skills, boundary-setting, and problem-solving in everyday terms. Originally from New York and listed with a New York LCSW credential, Catherine has spent decades in clinical and teaching roles. She aims to work alongside people who want straightforward feedback, practical strategies, and occasional lightness during difficult moments.
If someone is looking for conversational, goal-focused care, she seeks to make the process approachable and realistic.
Approach-focused care delivered online
Client-centered therapy puts the person first by listening closely and following each person's pace; it helps when someone needs empathy, understanding, and space to find their own solutions. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) focuses on the link between thoughts, feelings, and actions and offers practical exercises to reduce anxiety, manage mood symptoms, and change unhelpful habits. Mindfulness therapy teaches simple attention and breathing practices to reduce reactivity and improve coping with stress and cravings.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with each person to identify goals and try methods that match those aims. That means starting with what feels most helpful, checking progress, and adapting tools over time so the plan stays useful and realistic.
Online sessions make it easier to fit therapy into busy lives. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation when depth and visual cues matter. Phone sessions can be a good option when bandwidth is limited or a shorter check-in is preferred. Live chat and text-based messaging offer brief check-ins, notes between sessions, or a way to work when scheduling is tight. These options increase flexibility and make consistent care easier to maintain.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Intimacy-related issues
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 23 years
- Licensed
- New York
- Languages
- English