About Shelley
Shelley Adkins is a licensed clinical social worker in Kentucky who helps adults facing stress, anxiety, depression, grief, and the fallout from trauma. She brings 25 years of experience to practical, down-to-earth conversations. Sessions focus on small, useful changes clients can try between meetings.
Her work starts by listening. She aims to understand what matters most to each person and what gets in the way of day-to-day functioning. From there she and the client pick simple goals and manageable steps toward them.
Background and approach
Shelley uses several approaches to match different needs. She draws on client-centered methods to keep sessions focused on the client’s priorities. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps identify unhelpful thinking and build new habits.
Mindfulness techniques support stress reduction and emotional regulation. She also uses narrative and trauma-focused strategies when people want to process difficult events or rewrite the story they tell about themselves. That can help with relationship patterns, caregiving strain, chronic health challenges, and work burnout.
Shelley works with adults on issues such as parenting stress, family-of-origin problems, compassion fatigue, and career transitions. Her style is practical and steady, aiming to strengthen coping skills and restore a sense of direction.
How Shelley’s Approaches Work Online
Client-centered therapy focuses on the client’s priorities and experiences. Online sessions using this approach let the therapist follow what matters most to the person and adapt each meeting to current needs.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, helps identify patterns of thought and behavior that cause distress. In online sessions this often includes short exercises, thought tracking, and practical homework to try between meetings.
Mindfulness therapy teaches simple attention and breathing practices to reduce stress and improve emotional balance. These techniques can be taught and practiced during video or phone sessions and reinforced via text or chat prompts.
Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will listen to your goals, try methods that fit those goals, and adjust over time based on what helps. Clients and the therapist decide together which tools to keep using.
Online therapy offers flexibility in how people meet. Video calls work well for interactive exercises and face-to-face conversation. Phone sessions use less bandwidth and can be easier to fit into a work break. Live chat and text messaging support brief check-ins, skill reminders, or ongoing notes between longer sessions. These options make it easier to maintain continuity of care while adapting to daily life.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- HIV / AIDS
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- Kentucky
- Languages
- English