About Margaret
Margaret Couch is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker practicing in Illinois with 41 years of experience. She helps people facing stress, anxiety, depression, bipolar symptoms, ADHD, addictions, grief, and parenting challenges. She also supports concerns around relationships, intimacy, eating and sleeping problems, anger, and self-esteem.
Margaret meets people where they are. She treats each person as a whole person rather than a diagnosis. Her style is warm and practical, focusing on small, doable steps that fit everyday life.
Background and approach
She uses a mix of approaches to match what a person needs. That can include client-centered methods that follow a person’s pace, cognitive behavioral techniques to change unhelpful thoughts and habits, and skills-based work from dialectical behavior therapy for emotion regulation. Margaret’s background includes a Master’s degree in Education in addition to her social work license.
She has spent decades working in mental health settings and has experience across many concerns, including trauma, adoption and foster care issues, caregiving strain, chronic illness, and body image. Therapy with her tends to be collaborative. She listens, helps set clear goals, and offers practical tools along the way.
She welcomes people who want coaching-style support as well as those who want help managing intense emotions or life changes.
Practical therapy approaches for online care
Margaret uses client-centered work and cognitive behavioral therapy to guide online sessions. Client-centered work focuses on listening and following the person’s pace, which helps people feel heard and decide goals that matter to them. Cognitive behavioral therapy looks at thoughts and behaviors, teaching straightforward tools to reduce anxiety, improve sleep, and break unhelpful patterns.She also draws on dialectical behavior therapy skills when emotions feel intense. DBT-based techniques include grounding, distress tolerance, and emotion regulation skills that people can practice between sessions to manage strong feelings and improve relationships.
Choosing the right approach is a shared process. The therapist will discuss goals, try techniques, and adjust plans based on what helps. That collaborative setup aims to match methods to a person’s needs, preferences, and day-to-day life.
Online formats offer practical advantages. Video calls let people work face to face without travel. Phone sessions need less bandwidth and can be easier during busy days. Live chat and text messaging provide quick check-ins, brief coaching, or ongoing support between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into work, caregiving, or other routines while using approaches intended to give concrete skills and real-world tools.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Parenting issues
- Bipolar disorder
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trauma and abuse
- Traumatic brain injury
- Visually impaired
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 41 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English