About Dana
Dana Lapsley is a licensed clinical social worker in California who helps people facing stress, anxiety, relationship strain, and low self-esteem. She speaks plainly and meets people where they are. Parents who feel overwhelmed by family conflict or life changes will find clear, practical support.
Dana works with children, teens, and young adults and brings four years of clinical experience to each session. She focuses on everyday skills you can use between meetings, such as improving communication, managing worry, and building confidence.
Background and approach
Sessions are shaped around a person’s goals and pace rather than a one-size plan. She has experience addressing adoption and foster care questions, issues tied to body image, and patterns like avoidance or codependency. Dana also supports people dealing with compulsive thoughts, perfectionism, and the guilt or shame that often follows life transitions.
Her approach aims to reduce symptoms and help people make choices that feel right for them. Dana prioritizes respect, sensitivity, and compassion in her work. She adjusts conversation and techniques to fit each person’s needs, offering straightforward guidance and homework when helpful.
Her goal is to empower people to take small, manageable steps toward change. Working with Dana looks like honest talk, practical tools, and steady encouragement. She helps people untangle relationship and family problems, figure out life purpose questions, and cope with feelings of isolation or emptiness.
If someone is ready to try a different way of handling stress or anxiety, she will partner with them through that process.
Evidence-based techniques and online care
Evidence-based therapeutic techniques focus on concrete skills and changes in thinking and behavior. One common approach teaches skills for managing anxiety and stress, such as breathing, grounding, and step-by-step exposure to feared situations; these tools help reduce worry and avoidance. Another approach emphasizes improving communication and relationship patterns, with practice in how to express needs, set boundaries, and repair conflict; this can help with partners, parents, or other family members.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk with the client about goals, symptoms, and preferences and then try methods that fit those aims. Progress is checked regularly and techniques are adjusted to match what works for the individual.
Online therapy here is offered by video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to give flexibility. Video lets people work face to face when that helps, phone calls can be easier when bandwidth is limited, live chat suits quick check-ins, and messaging supports ongoing reflection between sessions. These options make it simpler to fit therapy around school, work, and family life while keeping the focus on practical tools and steady progress.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also works with
- Adoption and foster care
- Avoidant personality
- Body image
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Emptiness
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
- Experience
- 4 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English