About Shelly
Shelly Flachs is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) practicing in Illinois. She brings 12 years of experience helping people navigate stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction, and life changes. Shelly aims to make therapy approachable and practical for everyday problems.
Her sessions focus on building skills people can use right away. She uses methods from cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy to address patterns of thinking and emotion. She also draws on emotionally-focused and mindfulness approaches to help with relationships and grounding in the moment.
Background and approach
Shelly works with adults facing a wide range of concerns including grief, bipolar mood issues, eating and sleeping difficulties, anger, self-esteem, and career strain. She also supports people dealing with compassion fatigue, ADHD, intimacy-related issues, and parenting stress, tailoring each session to personal goals.
Her background as an LCSW includes more than a decade of clinical work across diverse settings, which informs a flexible, strengths-oriented style. Sessions emphasize clear goals, practical strategies, and steady progress rather than jargon or abstract theories. Clients can expect a collaborative pace.
Shelly listens closely, helps identify what matters most, and offers straightforward tools like thought-challenging, emotion regulation skills, and mindfulness practices. The work is practical and goal-focused, aimed at improving daily functioning and relationships.
Approaches you can use online
CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy, helps people spot and change unhelpful thought patterns and related behaviors. It is often used for anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and managing everyday stress. DBT, or dialectical behavior therapy, mixes practical skills for emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and improved relationships. It can be helpful for strong emotions, impulsive behaviors, and persistent relationship problems. Emotionally-Focused Therapy focuses on connecting feelings and relationship patterns, helping people understand attachment needs and improve closeness and communication.Choosing the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what has or hasn't helped before. Then she will suggest methods to try and adjust the plan as progress is made, keeping the process collaborative and outcome-focused.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging, which allow flexibility around work, caregiving, and travel. Video sessions work well for deeper conversational work and skill practice, phone sessions can fit a quick check-in or someone with limited bandwidth, and chat or messaging can support short updates and between-session coaching. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent and to use strategies when they come up in daily life.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 12 years
- Licensed
- Illinois, Maine, Missouri, Iowa
- Languages
- English
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