About Lara
Lara Ashbaugh is a Licensed Professional Counselor who brings ten years of clinical experience to her work. She offers a warm, respectful presence and focuses on helping people manage anxiety, depression, grief, stress, and life transitions. Lara uses practical therapeutic tools so conversations feel useful from the first session.
She blends Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with Client-Centered practices and mindfulness. That means she helps clients notice thoughts and feelings, clarify values, and try small, doable changes.
Background and approach
Lara also draws from Dialectical Behavior Therapy when emotion regulation and coping skills are needed. Her background includes supporting people dealing with addiction, trauma and abuse, ADHD, bipolar mood concerns, and compassion fatigue. She also works with issues around body image, gender dysphoria, fertility and adoption-related stress, and kink-aware care.
Lara describes her approach as interactive and strengths-focused, looking for what already works and building on it. Sessions tend to be collaborative and goal-oriented. Lara helps clients create concrete steps for managing intense feelings, improving communication, or restoring daily routines.
She also offers coaching-style support for career and life-direction questions. Lara practices as an LPC in Missouri. She conducts sessions in English and provides online options such as video calls, phone, live chat, or text messaging.
If someone is ready to begin, they can start with the platform’s matching process and schedule a session.
How therapeutic approaches shape online care
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people clarify what matters to them and take small, meaningful actions even when emotions are uncomfortable. It is often useful for anxiety, depression, and life changes because it focuses on values and committed steps. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) looks at patterns of thinking and behavior and teaches practical techniques to change unhelpful habits and reduce symptoms like worry or low mood. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) offers concrete skills for emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and improving communication in intense situations.Choosing the right approach is part of the work. Lara will collaborate with each person to mix and match methods based on goals, preferences, and how someone responds in early sessions. The process is flexible: she may teach a CBT technique one week and focus on ACT values the next, depending on what helps most.
Online therapy makes these methods more accessible through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video lets people work through exercises and notice nonverbal cues, phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited, live chat allows quick check-ins, and messaging supports ongoing reflection between appointments. These options help fit therapy into busy schedules and different life rhythms while keeping the work practical and skill-focused.
Questions people ask
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What this counselor works with
Most often
Also listed
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Emptiness
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- Gender dysphoria
- Guilt and shame
- Hearing impaired
- HIV / AIDS
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-harm
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed
- Missouri
- Languages
- English