Joan French , LCPC

Joan French is a licensed clinical professional counselor with 17 years of experience helping adults navigate stress, anxiety, depression, relationship strain, and life changes. She focuses on giving people a chance to feel heard and connected. Joan welcomes people who identify as LGBTQIA2S+ and those exploring gender questions.

Joan creates a calm, nonjudgmental space where clients can bring difficult or painful topics. She uses a blend of approaches to meet each person's needs, and she adds warmth and occasional humor to sessions when it fits. Her background includes a Master of Arts in Community Counseling and an Art Therapy certificate.

Her style is practical and down-to-earth. Sessions often include skills practice, emotion work, and straightforward conversation about patterns that cause pain. She pays attention to relationships, attachment, and how past hurts show up now.

Joan works with adult clients on a range of concerns such as grief, sleeping problems, career stress, and coping after separation or divorce. She also addresses issues like codependency, abandonment, guilt, shame, and isolation. The goal is usually clearer choices and calmer, steadier thinking.

Therapy can include short-term problem solving or longer work on deep patterns. Joan draws from evidence-based methods like cognitive behavioral strategies and emotion-focused techniques while tailoring sessions to each person. She aims to be patient, resourceful, and practical throughout the process.

Approaches in online care and what they do

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people notice painful thoughts without getting stuck in them and then move toward values-based actions. It can be useful for anxiety, depression, and coping with life transitions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on identifying unhelpful thinking and behavior patterns and replacing them with more effective options; it often helps with anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and stress. Emotionally-Focused Therapy centers on understanding and reshaping emotional responses in close relationships, which can reduce loneliness and improve communication.

Finding the best approach is part of the work together. Joan will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what feels most useful. That collaborative process guides whether sessions lean more toward acceptance and values, skills-based CBT, or emotion-focused exploration.

Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging, which add flexibility to fit therapy into a busy life. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues, phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited, live chat is helpful for brief check-ins, and text messaging supports ongoing reflection or short updates. These options make it simpler to keep continuity of care and to choose the format that matches a person's schedule and needs.