About Stephanie
Stephanie Southard is a licensed clinical social worker with deep experience helping people manage stress, anxiety, addiction, and relationship struggles. She creates a warm, nonjudgmental space where clients can speak honestly and set goals that matter to them. She uses practical, evidence-informed methods that focus on what a person wants to change.
Sessions often include talking through thoughts and behaviors, practicing new skills, and trying role-play or exercises when helpful.
Background and approach
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a frequent tool she uses to help clients notice and shift thinking patterns that get in the way. Stephanie has worked in social work since earning her master’s degree in 1999.
She brings more than two decades of experience across individual and group work, and she has supported people coping with trauma, grief, addiction, mood disorders, and parenting stress. Clients who face chronic illness, caregiver stress, blended family challenges, or problems tied to family of origin can expect a practical focus on communication and coping.
She also addresses codependency, body image, abandonment concerns, and issues around commitment and control. Based in New York, Stephanie balances clinical work with a quiet home life. She enjoys reading, writing, and crafting, and aims to help people build more meaningful, manageable days.
Her approach centers on collaboration and steady, concrete steps toward change.
Therapeutic Approaches and Online Care
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on noticing thoughts without getting stuck in them and clarifying personal values to guide action; it can help with anxiety, depression, and getting unstuck during life changes. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) looks at the link between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and uses practical exercises to shift unhelpful patterns, which is useful for anxiety, mood challenges, and stress. Attachment-Based Therapy explores how early relationships shape current connections and communication, and it can help with relationship struggles, abandonment concerns, and family dynamics.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will listen to your goals and preferences and then recommend or combine methods that fit your needs. You and the therapist decide together what to try, and plans are revisited as progress is made.
Online sessions use video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to offer flexibility. Video is useful for deeper conversation and practicing skills with visual cues. Phone calls can be easier when bandwidth is low or when a shorter check-in is needed. Live chat and text messaging work well for brief updates, coaching between sessions, or people who prefer writing. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy lives and varied schedules.
Frequently asked questions
What kinds of problems does she help address?
What is her general therapy style?
How much experience does she have working in social work?
Where is she licensed and based?
Are sessions available in other languages for international clients?
What session formats are offered?
How does payment and cost work?
How do I begin working with her?
Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 26 years
- Licensed
- New York
- Languages
- English