About Maria
Maria Conforti is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who brings 16 years of social work experience to her practice. She has worked in many settings, including independent practice, group homes, incarceration, community resources, and nonprofit programs. Maria speaks English and Italian and practices from Illinois.
Her background includes work with relationship struggles, trauma and abuse, grief, ADHD, and life coaching. She has also supported issues such as attachment concerns, communication problems, codependency, and caregiver stress.
Background and approach
Her experience includes work with high-risk youth programs, divorce mediation focused on child well-being, and group counseling addressing self-esteem. Maria uses a mix of approaches to fit each person. She draws on cognitive behavioral techniques, emotion-focused ideas, acceptance and commitment principles, and elements of dialectical behavior work when useful.
She also applies attachment-based thinking and a client-centered stance to tailor sessions around a person's needs and style. Sessions are direct but compassionate. Maria aims to be honest rather than sugarcoat hard truths, while still offering tenderness and respect.
She wants to help people find what is beneath their current patterns so they can make practical changes and move forward. Her goal is to teach skills so clients no longer need regular therapy. She looks for people who are ready to do the work, willing to try new ways of relating, and open to difficult but useful feedback.
Maria emphasizes collaboration and asks clients to be active partners in the process.
How therapeutic approaches translate to online care
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, focuses on helping people clarify their values and take action toward them while accepting difficult feelings. It can help with stuck patterns, anxiety about change, and motivation. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT, looks at unhelpful thinking and behavior patterns and teaches practical skills to change them, which is useful for mood, anxiety, and communication problems. Attachment-Based Therapy examines how early relationships shape current patterns and helps people rework how they connect and trust others.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and history, then suggest which methods to try first. Sessions can shift over time so the approach stays aligned with what the client needs.
Online therapy offers flexibility across several formats: video calls for face-to-face conversation, phone sessions when bandwidth is limited, live chat for quick check-ins, and text-based messaging for ongoing support. These options make it easier to fit sessions around work, caregiving, or travel. Licensed professionals can use the different formats to practice ACT, CBT, or attachment work in ways that match a client's routine and learning style.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
- Grief
Also works with
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Dependent personality
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Existential Therapy
- Gottman Method
- Jungian Therapy
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Narrative Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 16 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English, Italian