About Holly
Holly Gardenier offers calm, direct support for people facing stress, loss, addiction, or confusion about what comes next. She speaks plainly and helps individuals find clearer footing during hard times. Holly believes people carry deep answers inside and that therapy can uncover them one step at a time.
Holly is a Licensed Professional Counselor, based in Wisconsin, with 35 years of experience. She often works with people coping with trauma, grief, depression, anxiety, and addiction.
Background and approach
She also addresses concerns around intimacy, eating and food issues, anger, bipolar symptoms, and major life changes. Her sessions emphasize acceptance, present-moment awareness, and practical skills to manage strong emotions. Clients practice grounding and behavior changes that fit daily life.
Holly uses a person-centered stance that listens first and follows the client’s priorities. She brings techniques from acceptance and commitment work, dialectical skill-building, emotionally focused connection work, and existential reflection to help people make sense of painful experiences. Mindfulness and meditation are offered as everyday tools to reduce reactivity and support clearer decision making.
Holly aims to move beyond surface symptoms to the deeper patterns that shape feelings and choices. She helps people name what matters, tolerate uncertainty, and take small steps toward more meaningful living.
How her approaches translate to online work
Holly commonly uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which focuses on noticing what matters, accepting difficult feelings, and taking values-based action. This helps with anxiety, depression, grief, and coping with life transitions.She also applies Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills to teach emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Those concrete skills are useful for managing strong mood swings, anger, and urges linked to addiction.
Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Holly will listen to what you want to change and suggest methods that fit your goals and daily life. She adapts techniques so they work over conversation, exercises, and short practices between sessions.
Online formats like video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text messaging make therapy easier to fit into a busy routine. Video allows face-to-face conversation and shared exercises, phone can be a simpler check-in when bandwidth is low, and messaging supports brief updates or coaching between appointments. These options offer flexibility while keeping the work focused on symptoms, values, and practical steps toward coping.
Questions people ask
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What this counselor works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Stress, Anxiety
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Existential Therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 35 years
- Licensed
- Wisconsin
- Languages
- English