About Kristi
Kristi Whitford is a licensed clinical social worker with more than 20 years of experience helping people through crisis, loss, and overwhelm. She uses a warm, patient style and focuses on practical steps that make daily life feel more manageable. Kristi works with adults facing stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, and relationship or parenting concerns.
Kristi blends client-centered care with structured methods to meet people where they are. She listens closely, helps identify what matters most, and supports small changes that add up.
Background and approach
Sessions aim to reduce distress and build skills for coping with grief, addiction struggles, chronic illness, caregiver strain, and family-of-origin issues. Her background includes long experience responding to mental health crises and trauma. That work shaped a straightforward approach that balances empathy with clear goals.
She draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, and Solution-Focused techniques to tailor each plan. Kristi is credentialed as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, LCSW, and holds Florida licensure FL LCSW SW6939. She offers support around communication problems, intimacy-related issues, commitment and control struggles, and adjustment after divorce or separation.
Kristi also addresses concerns connected to adoption and foster care, cancer, and chronic pain or illness. People can expect a calm, nonjudgmental setting where practical steps are emphasized. The work is collaborative: Kristi helps set realistic goals and checks progress along the way.
She aims to make therapy a usable part of everyday life.
How ACT and Client-Centered Work Translate Online
Kristi uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help people notice hard thoughts and then take small actions that match their values. ACT is useful for anxiety, depression, grief, and ongoing stress because it teaches flexible ways to respond rather than getting stuck in avoidance.She also practices Client-Centered Therapy which focuses on listening closely and reflecting what matters most to the person. That approach helps people feel heard and clear about their next steps, especially with relationship and parenting concerns. Motivational Interviewing is used when change feels difficult; it helps uncover personal reasons to move forward and builds motivation one step at a time.
Choosing the right approach is part of the process. Kristi works collaboratively to pick techniques that fit a person’s needs, goals, and preferences. She reviews progress and adjusts the plan so sessions stay useful and focused on real-life changes.
Online options include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video is good for deeper conversation and reading nonverbal cues, phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited, live chat offers brief check-ins, and messaging supports ongoing reflection between meetings. These formats make therapy more flexible for work, caregiving, or medical schedules and let people keep consistent support without long commutes.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Addictions
- Adoption and foster care
- Cancer
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- Florida
- Languages
- English