About Gary
Gary Swan is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 21 years of professional experience in Wisconsin. He helps people manage stress and anxiety, cope with addictions and impulsive behaviors, and handle depression and mood concerns. He also supports clients dealing with relationship trust issues, low self-esteem, grief, and parenting strain.
Gary uses straightforward conversations and steady guidance to help people feel heard. He aims to build trust slowly so clients feel more comfortable sharing thoughts and feelings.
Background and approach
He focuses on practical skills like communication, motivation, and confidence building that can be used between sessions. In sessions he blends approaches to match each person’s needs. He draws on attachment-based ideas to look at trust and closeness, cognitive-behavioral strategies to change unhelpful thoughts and habits, and emotion-focused methods to address strong feelings.
Dialectical skills are used when emotions feel overwhelming and regulation is needed. Gary works with issues related to family of origin, blended family challenges, codependency, and co-occurring conditions such as substance use and mood disorders. He also helps people facing life changes, forgiveness work, and the fallout of trauma and abuse.
His style is calm, direct, and solution-oriented. He invites people to take small steps toward change and to try new ways of coping. Gary encourages clients to write the next chapter of their life and offers steady support while they do that.
How these approaches work online
Attachment-based work looks at how past relationships shape trust and closeness today; online sessions use conversation to identify patterns and rehearse new ways of relating. Client-centered therapy focuses on listening and understanding the person’s experience; the therapist offers empathy and reflection to help someone feel seen and make their own decisions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, breaks problems into thoughts, behaviors, and feelings and teaches steps to change unhelpful patterns and try different actions.Choosing the right approach is part of the process. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, strengths, and what feels most helpful. Together they decide which methods to use and adjust them over time based on what works.
Online therapy offers flexible options like video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video is useful for full conversations and visual cues, phone sessions work when bandwidth is limited, live chat can allow quicker check-ins, and messaging supports short updates or ongoing coaching between sessions. These formats make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life and to keep work going when travel or schedules change.
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Addictions
- Relationship issues
Also works with
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Mood disorders
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 21 years
- Licensed
- Wisconsin
- Languages
- English