About Derrell
Derrell Tidwell is a licensed clinical social worker with more than four decades of practice. He uses client-centered and practical approaches to help people manage stress, anxiety, depression, and relationship concerns. He also supports people facing grief, trauma, LGBT questions, and challenges around self-esteem or eating issues.
Derrell emphasizes that each person knows their story best. He helps clients notice strengths and apply them to real problems. Sessions focus on clear, usable steps rather than long lectures.
Background and approach
The aim is greater clarity and more effective daily coping. He blends several methods to match what someone needs. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps people spot and change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors.
Solution-focused work sets short-term goals and tracks progress. When past events keep coming up, trauma-focused and psychodynamic ideas are used to understand patterns and free up energy for change. Derrell has worked across California and Washington and holds LCSW and LICSW credentials.
He brings a long history of practice and attention to multicultural concerns and issues faced by people of color. That background informs how he listens and responds. Clients can expect straightforward conversation, practical tools, and room to say what matters to them.
Sessions aim to reduce immediate distress and build skills for future challenges. The focus is on what will help in everyday life. To begin, a simple matching process pairs people with a therapist and then scheduling follows.
Derrell encourages people to take the first step and notes that small changes add up over time.
Choosing an approach that fits your needs online
Client-centered therapy focuses on listening and building on your own strengths. It gives you space to tell your story while the therapist helps you identify what matters and what you already do well. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at the links between thoughts, feelings, and actions and teaches practical tools to change patterns that cause distress. Trauma-focused therapy concentrates on the effects of difficult events and uses gentle methods to reduce their disruptive impact on daily life.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with each person to figure out which methods match their goals and preferences. That means checking in, adapting techniques, and making changes together as progress unfolds.
Online sessions use video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. Video calls let people see nonverbal cues, phone sessions can work when bandwidth is limited, live chat suits shorter check-ins, and messaging helps maintain continuity between conversations. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life and to continue work from different places.
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- LGBT
- Relationship issues
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Eating disorders
- Family conflicts
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 42 years
- Licensed
- California, Washington
- Languages
- English