Susan Garner , LMFT

Susan Garner is an LMFT (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist) with 20 years of clinical practice, combining professional training, clinical experience, and personal insight to support clients through a wide range of life challenges. She has worked with people aged 17 through 70 and beyond, meeting with individuals, families, and couples - including same-sex partnerships - from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Her practice centers on a steady commitment to each person’s healing and growth, and she collaborates with clients to define clear objectives and achievable goals.

Susan recognizes that the issues clients bring to therapy are often complex and interconnected, frequently rooted in a core emotional injury, traumatic event, or longstanding family-of-origin patterns. She helps clients identify those underlying sources while building new skills for healthier, higher-functioning relationships and improved day-to-day coping. Whether the aim is to resolve relationship conflict, manage mood concerns, navigate life transitions, or enhance performance toward personal goals, she focuses first on clarifying the problem as the foundation for change.

Viewing therapy as both a reflective and practical process, Susan emphasizes the therapeutic relationship as central to progress. She blends approaches from Eastern traditions such as mindfulness and insight-oriented practices with Western methods like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, along with somatic body-mind work and psychodynamic perspectives, to tailor treatment to each person’s needs. Her experience includes work with stress and anxiety, trauma and abuse, intimacy-related concerns, depression, grief, family and blended-family issues, anger, self-esteem, ADHD, bipolar, and related areas such as abandonment, attachment difficulties, codependency, infidelity, and life transitions.

Approaches That Guide Online Care

Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on how early relationships shape current patterns of relating. It helps clients explore attachment wounds and build more secure ways of connecting, which is useful for intimacy issues, abandonment concerns, and relationship conflict.

Client-Centered Therapy emphasizes the therapist’s empathetic, nonjudgmental presence and supports clients in discovering their own solutions. This approach can strengthen self-esteem, clarify personal values, and help people navigate life transitions through a compassionate, collaborative process.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps clients identify and shift unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. It offers practical tools for managing anxiety, mood symptoms, and stress, and for changing patterns that interfere with daily functioning.

Finding the right approach is part of therapy itself; licensed professionals work collaboratively with each client to determine which methods best fit the client’s needs, goals, and preferences. The therapist may blend techniques and adjust the plan over time to match progress and changing priorities.

Online therapy provides flexible ways to engage in this work, including video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. These options make it easier to maintain continuity of care around work, family, and other commitments, while offering regular access to therapists who can guide treatment and support ongoing growth.