About Crista
Crista Shaw, LCPC, is a licensed clinician in Maine with 15 years of experience helping people manage stress, anxiety, mood concerns, and ADHD. She focuses on practical, down-to-earth support so people can get through hard days and start making steady changes. Crista aims to make the first steps less overwhelming for someone who is worried or unsure about therapy.
Crista builds a calm, nonjudgmental space where clients can speak honestly about what they are facing.
Background and approach
She listens for patterns that get in the way and works with each person to set clear, doable goals. Sessions emphasize straightforward skills clients can use between meetings. Her approach blends client-centered care with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which looks at thoughts and behaviors, and Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which teaches emotion and coping skills.
Crista also draws on trauma-focused methods when past events are affecting daily life. These approaches inform how she helps people reduce anxiety, manage anger, and address family-related stress. Over 15 years Crista has supported people through grief, parenting strain, adoption and foster care concerns, and issues around sexuality and women's health.
She also helps those coping with impulsivity, isolation, and life-purpose questions. Her work often addresses overlapping problems like mood disorders and postpartum depression. Crista conducts sessions in English and works online by phone, video, live chat, or text messaging.
She uses a subscription model that can be canceled at any time. To begin, a short matching questionnaire is completed and scheduling follows the therapist's availability.
How Crista’s approaches translate to online work
Client-centered therapy puts the person’s priorities at the center of each session, encouraging honest talk about what matters most and shaping treatment around individual goals. This approach helps when someone needs steady, empathic support and practical problem solving.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on the links between thoughts, feelings, and actions and teaches simple exercises to change unhelpful patterns. CBT is often helpful for anxiety, mood concerns, and managing ADHD-related challenges like impulsivity and organization. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) emphasizes emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal skills to reduce intense reactions and improve coping during stressful moments.
Finding the right approach is collaborative. Crista will review your concerns, try small techniques, and adjust methods based on how well they fit your needs and goals. Clients work together with her to choose skills that feel useful and realistic for their daily life.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to increase flexibility. Video calls allow a fuller conversation and visual cues, phone sessions need less bandwidth, live chat can be a quick check-in, and text messaging supports brief reflections or ongoing reminders between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into work, family life, and busy schedules.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Blended family issues
- Co-morbidity
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Eating disorders
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Parenting issues
- Postpartum depression
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Sexuality
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 15 years
- Licensed
- Maine
- Languages
- English
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