Claudia Stephens

Claudia Stephens is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) licensed in Virginia and Texas with 27 years of practice. She focuses on stress, anxiety, depression, trauma and abuse, and life-purpose questions, alongside parenting and relationship concerns. Claudia also addresses career uncertainty, grief, ADHD, and compassion fatigue.

She draws on Attachment-Based Therapy and Client-Centered approaches to help people talk through relationship patterns and feelings of abandonment or emptiness. Claudia uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and mindfulness techniques to identify unhelpful thinking and build practical coping skills.

Sessions tend to look like clear conversations about what is most troubling right now. She helps people notice how past family experiences shape current choices, and works on specific skills for communication and impulse control. EMDR is used as one of the tools when trauma memories need targeted processing.

Her background includes many years as a clinical social worker and time as a middle school counselor, which she says gave broad experience across developmental stages. That history informs how she understands family of origin issues, blended family dynamics, and parenting strain.

Claudia aims to help clients sort through career doubts, work through grief and shame, and improve intimacy and commitment struggles. Practical steps, symptom-focused strategies, and discussion about values and purpose are woven together across sessions.

How her approaches translate to online work

Attachment-Based Therapy looks at how early relationships shape how people relate now. Online sessions using this lens focus on noticing patterns in current relationships and trying new ways of connecting and communicating. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is about spotting unhelpful thoughts and testing them with small behavioral experiments; it often involves homework such as logs or short practice exercises between sessions. EMDR is a trauma-focused method that helps process distressing memories; when used it follows a stepwise plan to reduce the intensity of specific memories.

Finding the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what feels most useful, and then suggest which methods to try first. That plan can change as progress or new priorities appear, and adjustments are made collaboratively.

The practical benefits of online work include fitting sessions into a busy day and keeping a consistent schedule during life transitions. If you want to know which session formats are offered for Claudia, confirm current options before booking. Many people find remote sessions help them continue care through job changes, relocation, or when it is easier to have a shorter check-in during a break.