About Susan
Susan Shafer is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor who practices with a calm, practical focus. She brings 15 years of experience and centers sessions on what will help a person feel steadier and more capable. Her style is down-to-earth and direct, aimed at clear steps rather than jargon.
She often uses client-centered methods to build trust and understand what matters most to each person. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a common tool in her work to help identify unhelpful thoughts and try new behaviors.
Background and approach
Mindfulness practices are used to teach simple breathing and awareness skills that reduce reactivity. Susan has helped people facing anxiety, depression, bipolar mood concerns, and the fallout from trauma and abuse. She also supports those coping with grief, life changes, parenting stress, relationship and family tensions, and workplace or career challenges.
Addiction and ADHD are also within her focus. Her background includes work across multiple settings with children, adolescents, adults, and families earlier in her career, and she now brings that breadth to conversations about practical coping and daily routines. She encourages small experiments clients can try between meetings.
Sessions may include goal-setting, breath-based exercises, thought-restructuring, and brief solution-focused planning. Susan emphasizes building inner resources, improving communication, and creating manageable routines for sleep, work, and self-care. She works from New Jersey and conducts sessions in English.
Therapeutic approaches you can use online
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on listening and responding to what each person needs. It helps people feel heard, identify their goals, and find their own path forward. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts and actions reinforce each other and offers practical steps to try different thinking and behaviors for anxiety, depression, and mood concerns.Finding the right approach is a shared process. The therapist will talk with the client about goals, preferences, and what has or hasn’t worked before. Together they will try techniques and adjust the plan so it fits day-to-day life and the problems the person wants to address.
Online sessions can use video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy more practical. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues, phone sessions work well when bandwidth is limited, live chat can be a shorter check-in, and text messaging supports ongoing reminders and brief reflections between meetings. These options help fit therapy around work, family, and other commitments.
Questions people ask
What kinds of concerns does she help with?
What is her general therapy style?
How much clinical experience does she have?
Where is she licensed and based?
Which languages are sessions offered in?
Can people outside the U.S. work with her?
What session formats are available?
How do I start working with her and what does it cost?
What this counselor works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Trauma and abuse
- Anger management
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Divorce and separation
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Life purpose
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 15 years
- Licensed
- North Carolina, New Jersey
- Languages
- English