About Keley
Dr. Keley Smith-Keller is a licensed professional counselor in South Dakota with three decades of experience. She combines practical career guidance with counseling to help people manage stress, anxiety, and life transitions.
She draws on her background in higher education and adult learning to offer calm, steady support. She holds a master’s degree in counseling and a doctorate in adult and higher education. Over the years she has helped adults adjust to college life, sort through career decisions, and reduce anxiety about relationships and work.
Background and approach
Her career knowledge informs conversations about purpose and next steps. Her style is direct and collaborative. She asks questions that help people name the future they want.
She also uses writing and chat as tools to clarify thoughts and feelings. That approach can be useful for people who process well through words. Therapy sessions may focus on coping with grief, addressing trauma or abuse, improving self-esteem, or handling workplace and life changes.
She also offers support around eating and food-related issues, aging and geriatric concerns, forgiveness, and women’s issues. The work is aimed at practical change and clearer decision making. Dr.
Smith-Keller blends narrative and solution-focused methods with mindfulness and DBT-informed skills when helpful. She encourages small experiments and concrete steps toward goals. The emphasis is on usable strategies and steady progress.
How specific approaches translate to online work
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, focuses on building skills for managing strong emotions and improving relationships. Online sessions can teach breathing, grounding, and emotion regulation skills and practice them through discussion and exercises.Mindfulness Therapy helps people notice thoughts and feelings without getting swept up by them. In remote sessions this might include short guided exercises, reflection prompts, and using writing to track patterns between meetings.
Choosing an approach is collaborative. The therapist will listen to goals and try methods that fit the person's needs and preferences. If something isn't helping, she adjusts the plan and tries a different strategy together.
Online formats - video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text messaging - make it easier to fit work into daily life. Video allows face-to-face conversation and visual cues. Phone sessions work well when bandwidth is limited or a quick check-in is needed. Live chat and text let people use writing as part of the work and provide short, focused exchanges between sessions. These options support flexibility and ongoing practice of skills learned in therapy.
Questions people ask
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What this counselor works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Self esteem
- Career difficulties
Also listed
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Coaching
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Family conflicts
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Life purpose
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 30 years
- Licensed
- South Dakota
- Languages
- English