About Elaine
Elaine Hughes is a licensed clinical social worker with nearly two decades of practice experience. She is listed as a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, LICSW, and as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, LCSW, and she practices with a focus on helping people manage stress, anxiety, grief, trauma, and depression.
Elaine works from a practical, down-to-earth stance and encourages people to use their existing strengths as they move forward. Elaine listens for what matters most to each person and helps them build clear steps to feel better.
Background and approach
She uses tools that teach new ways of thinking, managing strong emotions, and improving relationships. Sessions are straightforward and aimed at skills that people can use between meetings. She brings 19 years of experience to her work and has supported people facing a wide range of issues.
These include caregiving strain, chronic illness or pain, body image and eating concerns, relationship and communication problems, and the impact of loss and major life changes. Elaine also assists people dealing with abandonment, attachment questions, and fertility or cancer-related stress. Her approach mixes gentle, relational work with practical techniques.
She may draw on attachment-focused ideas to strengthen bonds, cognitive methods to shift unhelpful thoughts, and mindfulness practices to calm the nervous system. The aim is to build coping skills that fit everyday life. Elaine practices in New Jersey and offers sessions in English.
She values collaboration and helps people set realistic goals, step by step.
How her approaches translate to online therapy
Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on relationships and how past bonds shape current feelings. In sessions she helps people understand patterns in close relationships and practice new ways to connect and feel safer with others. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at thoughts and behaviors that keep problems going. She uses CBT techniques to help identify unhelpful thinking, test new beliefs, and try different actions that change mood and stress levels. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, DBT, teaches concrete emotion regulation and distress tolerance skills. Those tools help when emotions feel overwhelming or when someone needs steadier coping strategies.Finding the right approach is part of the work. She will talk with each person about their goals, preferences, and what feels most useful, then shape the plan together. That collaborative process helps pick techniques that match daily life and the kinds of challenges a person brings.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy more flexible. Video sessions let people work face to face from different locations. Phone sessions can fit into a short break or require less bandwidth. Chat or text messaging can support quick check-ins, homework, or ongoing coaching between meetings. These options help people fit therapy into busy schedules and keep momentum between sessions.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Attachment issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating and food-related issues
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- HIV / AIDS
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Traumatic brain injury
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 19 years
- Licensed
- New Jersey, Vermont, New Hampshire
- Languages
- English