About Sherrin
Dr. Sherrin Packer-Rosenthal helps people who are feeling overwhelmed by stress, anxiety, trauma, and life changes. She is a licensed clinical social worker and licensed professional clinical counselor in California with forty years of experience.
She makes space for honest conversation and practical steps toward feeling more stable and confident. She creates a calm setting where thoughts and feelings can be shared without judgment. Sessions focus on what matters most to the client, with clear goals and tools to use between meetings.
Background and approach
She often teaches skills for managing strong emotions and repairing everyday relationship ruptures. Her approach draws from attachment work, client-centered methods, cognitive behavioral strategies, dialectical behavior skills, and the Gottman Method. She selects techniques that fit the person and their life rather than using one fixed model.
The emphasis is on learning practical ways to cope and on building self-compassion. Across a long career she has worked with many community programs, helped create support services for children, and trained alongside leaders in trauma and attachment research. She is familiar with school systems and supports families navigating IEPs and 504 plans when needed.
That background informs a practical, experience-based style. Clients can expect to learn concrete skills and to be guided toward becoming experts in their own lives. The work includes helping parents become more confident, repairing everyday relationship strains, and building routines to manage ongoing stress.
How therapeutic approaches translate to online care
Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on how relationships shape feelings and reactions. Online sessions use conversation and exercises to help clients notice patterns, strengthen bonds, and repair relationship ruptures. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at thoughts and actions that keep problems going. In remote work this means identifying unhelpful thoughts, testing them with homework, and practicing new behaviors between sessions to reduce anxiety or stress.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will discuss different methods and choose or combine ones that match the client’s goals and preferences. That decision is made together, and can be adjusted as needs change over time.
Offering video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging makes therapy more flexible. Video is useful for full-session conversations and skill practice. Phone calls can be easier when bandwidth is limited or when a client prefers not to use video. Live chat or text-based messaging supports quick check-ins, brief coaching, or ongoing practice of skills between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life while working toward steady progress.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Trauma and abuse
- Parenting issues
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 40 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English