Christine Penwell , LPC

Christine Penwell is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) practicing in Tennessee with a focused background in family systems, trauma recovery, and support for parents of neurodivergent children. Over her career she has worked across Missouri, Illinois, and Tennessee, offering individual, couple, and family therapy that centers on understanding how trauma shapes behavior and relationships. She brings a holistic perspective to trauma and recovery, integrating clinical training with practical strategies to help people navigate difficult life transitions and relationship challenges.

Christine’s therapeutic stance is rooted in empathy, unconditional positive regard, and authenticity, reflecting the client-centered approach developed by Carl Rogers. She follows a client-led model, believing that each person is the expert on their own life and that the therapist’s role is to help uncover insight, build coping skills, and strengthen connection. Her work often addresses relationship and family concerns, parenting, abandonment and attachment issues, intimacy and commitment struggles, stress and anxiety, self-esteem, career coaching, ADHD, and complex trauma-related presentations including dissociation and effects of domestic violence.

She is trained in a range of modalities to tailor care to individual needs, including developmental trauma work, Internal Family Systems, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Solution-Focused Therapy, Trust-Based Relational Intervention, Sensory Motor Arousal Regulation Therapy, and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), with additional exposure to Emotionally Focused Therapy. Christine is also certified in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics by Dr. Bruce Perry, a framework often used when working with developmental and trauma-related difficulties.

Therapeutic Approaches and Online Care

Christine often integrates client-centered therapy, attachment-based work, and cognitive behavioral techniques into online care to meet each person’s goals. Client-centered therapy emphasizes empathy, unconditional positive regard, and following the client’s lead to build insight and confidence - this approach supports people who need a trusting, validating space to explore personal challenges. Attachment-based therapy focuses on patterns of connection and how early relationships shape current responses; it can help with abandonment, adoption and foster care concerns, intimacy struggles, and family-of-origin issues. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) provides practical tools to identify and shift unhelpful thoughts and behaviors, making it useful for anxiety, stress, coping with life changes, and mood regulation.

Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Christine will work with each person to assess needs, preferences, and goals, and then tailor therapeutic methods accordingly so that interventions feel relevant and manageable. The therapist and client decide together which strategies to prioritize.

Online therapy offers flexibility and accessibility through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. These options make it easier to fit sessions into busy schedules, maintain continuity of care across life changes, and access support from home or other convenient locations. Licensed professionals can adapt the chosen approaches to work effectively across these formats while keeping the focus on practical progress and relational connection.