About Sharmen
Sharmen Rutherford is a Licensed Professional Counselor - Mental Health Service Provider and a Licensed Professional Counselor with 16 years of experience. She focuses on practical help for people feeling overwhelmed by stress, anxiety, addiction, grief, eating concerns, mood shifts, ADHD, and other life challenges. She meets people where they are and starts by listening.
Sessions focus on clear goals and skills people can use between meetings. Sharmen draws on therapies that teach new ways to manage thoughts, feelings, and behavior so everyday life feels more manageable.
Background and approach
Her background includes many years working with addiction and trauma-related issues alongside mood and anxiety concerns. That experience shapes how she structures sessions - with attention to safety, coping skills, and step-by-step progress. She also supports people dealing with work stress, compassion fatigue, and career transitions.
Sharmen uses several practical approaches in therapy, including acceptance and commitment ideas, cognitive behavioral techniques, mindfulness practices, dialectical behavior strategies, and a client-centered style. These methods are used to build skills for emotion regulation, improved focus, clearer values, and healthier routines. Sessions are offered from Alabama and conducted in English.
Sharmen works with people to set realistic next steps and teaches tools for managing daily challenges like sleep, anger, concentration, and motivation. She emphasizes steady, manageable change rather than quick fixes.
Therapeutic approaches and online care that fit your life
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people clarify what matters most and take small steps toward those values while learning to live with difficult thoughts. It is useful for stress, low motivation, and life transitions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on identifying unhelpful thinking and trying different behaviors to change mood and functioning; it is often used for anxiety, depression, and sleep problems.Finding the right approach happens together. The therapist will discuss goals, preferences, and what feels most helpful, then try methods that fit the person's needs. Sessions can shift over time as goals change, and techniques are introduced at a comfortable pace.
Online therapy is offered through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to make care more flexible. Video calls work well for in-depth conversations and demonstrations of skills, phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited or a quieter voice check-in is needed, and messaging or live chat suit short check-ins, skill coaching between sessions, or when writing helps process thoughts. These options make it simpler to fit therapy into busy days and to keep consistent work toward goals.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Also listed
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 16 years
- Licensed
- Alabama, Tennessee
- Languages
- English
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