About Margaret
Margaret Couch is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with decades of experience helping people cope with anxiety, stress, depression, ADHD, addictions, and relationship concerns. She brings a calm, practical style to sessions and focuses on what matters in daily life. Margaret meets each person where they are and treats them as a whole person, not a diagnosis.
She draws on 41 years in mental health and a Master’s degree in Education, so she combines clinical insight with clear teaching and problem-solving.
Background and approach
In sessions she listens first, then uses straightforward tools to help manage symptoms, rebuild routines, and address parenting and career stress. Margaret uses approaches that include client-centered work, cognitive behavioral techniques, and skills from dialectical behavior therapy. She also incorporates emotion-focused ideas and methods that support relationships when relevant.
This mix helps people learn new habits, handle strong emotions, and improve communication. Her efforts often focus on practical changes: structuring days, improving sleep and eating patterns, reducing substance use, and tackling self-esteem or intimacy issues. She also helps people navigate grief, trauma, adoption or foster care questions, and complex medical or caregiving stress.
Sessions are offered in English and Margaret accepts international clients. People connect by video, phone, live chat, or text messaging. Getting started involves a short matching questionnaire and scheduling based on availability.
Therapeutic approaches and online care that fit your life
Client-centered therapy focuses on listening and responding to each person’s priorities. It helps when someone needs a respectful space to talk, to clarify goals, and to build confidence in making choices.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, breaks problems into thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It teaches practical steps to change unhelpful thinking and create routines that support better sleep, attention, mood, and daily functioning.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, offers skills for managing intense emotions and improving distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness. Those skills can help with anger, relationship strain, and impulsive behaviors.
Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work together. The therapist and client review needs, goals, and preferences and adjust methods as progress is made. That collaborative process helps tailor sessions to what actually helps day to day.
Online therapy via video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text messaging makes it easier to fit therapy into busy schedules. Video is useful for full sessions and face-to-face conversation. Phone calls can work when bandwidth is limited or a shorter check-in is needed. Live chat and text-based messaging are handy for brief reflections, coaching-style support, or when writing feels clearer. These options offer flexibility so people can continue therapy around work, caregiving, and other demands.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Parenting issues
- Bipolar disorder
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trauma and abuse
- Traumatic brain injury
- Visually impaired
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 41 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English
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