About Claire
Claire McDonough is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with 21 years of experience in mental health. She works with people facing stress, anxiety, depression, ADHD, bipolar challenges, and relationship or parenting concerns. Claire aims to make the first steps into therapy straightforward and respectful.
She trained with a range of therapeutic approaches and uses them to match each person’s needs. Early sessions focus on listening and building trust. After that she and the client set goals and try practical strategies that fit day-to-day life.
Background and approach
Claire often uses clear, concrete tools to reduce overwhelming feelings and improve coping. That can mean learning new ways to notice thoughts, manage intense emotions, or change unhelpful patterns in relationships. She also helps people sort through grief, trauma, addiction issues, and career or caregiver stress.
Clients who struggle with communication, attachment worries, or impulsivity get help breaking situations into manageable steps. She brings steady support for matters like intimacy, forgiveness, guilt, and shame. Her approach includes mindfulness practices to ground attention and reduce reactivity.
With a career spanning many clinical settings, Claire draws on broad experience rather than one fixed method. She aims to challenge people gently while offering practical skills. Her goal is to help clients build clearer routines and stronger ways to handle life’s changes.
How therapeutic approaches translate to online care
Claire commonly uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which helps people notice and change unhelpful thinking and behavior patterns to reduce anxiety, depression, and ADHD-related difficulties. Sessions might include setting small goals, trying out new routines, and practicing skills between meetings.She also uses Dialectical Behavior Therapy to teach tools for managing strong emotions and improving distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness. DBT-style skills can be practiced in session and reviewed over messages or brief check-ins when needed.
Finding the right approach is part of the work together. Claire will talk with the client about goals, preferences, and what has or hasn't helped in the past, then suggest methods to try. That planning is collaborative and can be adjusted as progress is made.
Online therapy makes it easier to fit sessions into busy lives. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues, phone sessions can be used when internet quality is low, and live chat or text-based messaging are useful for quick check-ins, skill coaching, or brief follow-ups. These options give flexibility for different days and needs while keeping focus on practical skill-building and emotional regulation.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Bipolar disorder
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Parenting issues
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 21 years
- Licensed
- New Jersey
- Languages
- English
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