About Matthew
Matthew Esselstrom is a California-licensed marriage and family therapist with 22 years of professional experience. He focuses on helping people who feel stuck by offering steady, practical guidance. His approach is respectful and down-to-earth, aimed at making change feel possible.
He works with a wide range of concerns including stress, anxiety, depression, and ADHD. He also helps people struggling with relationship and intimacy issues, anger, addiction, grief, and career-related stress.
Background and approach
Matthew adapts conversations and plans to fit each person’s situation rather than using the same steps for everyone. Sessions are conversational and goal-oriented. Matthew listens for what matters most to the client and helps break larger problems into manageable steps.
He prioritizes building trust and a clear plan so progress is easier to track. He brings two decades of experience to common life transitions and emotional challenges. That experience includes support around trauma, parenting strain, caregiver stress, and issues tied to identity and sexual orientation.
Matthew focuses on helping people regain function and hope in daily life. People who prefer direct, practical work often find his style helpful. He aims to combine compassion with straightforward tools clients can use between sessions.
Matthew emphasizes collaboration – he and the client set goals together and check progress as they go.
How practical approaches translate to online care
Evidence-based techniques focus on clear, repeatable steps that people can use between sessions. One common approach emphasizes identifying patterns that cause stress and then testing small behavior changes to reduce those patterns; it helps with anxiety, ADHD-related routines, and mood concerns. Another approach focuses on building skills for managing emotions and relationships by practicing new responses in everyday situations; this is useful for anger, intimacy issues, and communication struggles.Finding the right approach is part of the work. Matthew will collaborate with each person to choose or adjust methods based on goals, daily life demands, and what feels most helpful. He checks in on progress and changes the plan when something isn’t working so the work stays practical and relevant.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging, which make it easier to fit therapy into a busy schedule. Video is good for in-depth conversations and visual cues. Phone sessions work well when bandwidth is limited or a quieter audio check-in is needed. Live chat and messaging let people send brief updates, try quick coaching between sessions, or maintain momentum when time is tight.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Anger management
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Young adult issues
- Experience
- 22 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English
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