About Suzanne
Suzanne Ornelas is a New Mexico-based licensed professional counselor clinical candidate, LPCC, with 20 years of experience. She helps people facing trauma and abuse, grief and loss, parenting challenges, anger, depression, anxiety, and stress. She also supports concerns around relationships, intimacy, self-esteem, ADHD, compassion fatigue, and life transitions.
Her style is straightforward and compassionate. She treats people with respect and sensitivity and adapts conversations to each person's needs. Sessions focus on practical steps and small changes that feel doable between meetings.
Background and approach
Suzanne aims to build a clear, personalized plan with each person. That plan can include coaching-style strategies for problem solving and tools to manage strong feelings. She will adjust the approach as progress is made or goals evolve.
Over two decades she has worked with issues common to first responders, hoarding behaviors, and hospice and end-of-life counseling. That background informs how she listens for patterns and offers concrete coping ideas. Her work is collaborative and paced to the person in front of her.
Suzanne encourages realistic goals, steady progress, and practical ways to manage daily life while addressing deeper concerns.
Evidence-based approaches and online care
Many clinicians use evidence-based techniques that focus on changing unhelpful thoughts and behaviors and on building coping skills. Cognitive-style approaches help identify thinking patterns that contribute to anxiety, depression, and stress, then teach practical strategies to shift those thoughts and test new behaviors in daily life. Skills-based work targets emotion regulation and anger management so people have tools to calm down and respond differently when feelings run high.Trauma-informed methods help people process distressing events at a comfortable pace. These approaches emphasize safety, pacing, and using grounding and coping strategies while processing painful memories or reactions. They can be helpful for trauma, grief, and compassion fatigue where pacing and skill-building matter most.
Finding the right fit is a collaborative process. The therapist will discuss goals, preferences, and past experiences and then suggest which techniques to try first. Plans are adjusted over time based on what helps and what doesn’t.
Online sessions offer flexibility for people with busy schedules or limited travel options. Video calls allow face-to-face interaction when that feels useful. Phone sessions can work when bandwidth is low or when someone prefers not to use video. Live chat and text messaging provide shorter check-ins, ongoing coaching, or support between longer sessions, making it easier to maintain steady progress.
Questions people ask
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What this counselor works with
Most often
- Trauma and abuse
- Grief
- Parenting issues
Also listed
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Coaching
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Family conflicts
- First responder issues
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Intimacy-related issues
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Stress, Anxiety
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- New Mexico
- Languages
- English