About Paula
Paula Donovan is a licensed clinical social worker who brings two decades of experience to her practice in Virginia. She listens without judgment and helps people sort through stress, anxiety, grief, relationship pain, addiction concerns, and changes in life stage. Paula uses clear, practical steps alongside steady support so people can feel less stuck and more able to move forward.
Paula values the person’s own knowledge about their life. She draws on client-centered methods to shape conversations around each person’s goals.
Background and approach
She also uses cognitive behavioral ideas to spot thought and behavior patterns that keep people struggling. Mindfulness and dialectical skills are woven in for managing strong emotions and overwhelming days. In sessions Paula helps people identify strengths and small shifts that make daily life easier.
She pays attention to how relationships, work, health, and culture affect mood and energy. Topics she commonly addresses include self-esteem, coping with loss, intimacy issues, sleep and eating problems, caregiver strain, and career transitions. Her style is warm and direct.
Paula aims for a trusting working relationship and practical tools that fit a person’s routine. She blends listening with actionable steps so people can try changes between sessions. Paula trained and practiced internationally before moving to the United States, and she keeps a global awareness when working with multicultural concerns.
Her approach is collaborative and paced to each person’s needs.
Approaches that translate well to online therapy
Paula uses client-centered work to focus on what matters most to each person. This approach centers the person’s own goals and experiences and guides the pace and focus of sessions. It helps when someone needs a space to make sense of difficult feelings or to plan steps forward.She also uses cognitive behavioral techniques to identify unhelpful thinking and small behavioral changes. Those techniques work well online because they often include homework, tracking, and short skill practices that are easy to review over video or chat. Dialectical behavior therapy skills are also part of her toolkit to help with managing intense emotions and building distress tolerance.
Paula treats finding the right approach as a team effort. She asks about your needs, goals, and daily routine, and then suggests approaches to try. You can expect collaboration on what feels helpful and adjustments along the way based on what actually works for you.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to offer flexibility. Video is useful for focused conversation and teaching skills. Phone sessions use less bandwidth and can fit into a work break or a busy day. Live chat and text are handy for brief check-ins, quick coaching, and reminders of skills between longer sessions.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Grief
Also works with
- Addictions
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating disorders
- Family conflicts
- Fertility issues
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- Virginia
- Languages
- English