Nora O'Connor , LCSW

Nora O'Connor is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in California with 15 years of practice. She focuses on everyday struggles like stress, anxiety, addiction recovery, and issues related to sexual orientation and identity. Nora aims to make therapy practical and down-to-earth for people feeling overwhelmed or stuck.

Nora blends Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with somatic awareness to help clients notice how thoughts and body sensations are connected. She also uses mindfulness and solution-focused work to build coping skills and clear next steps. Sessions are conversational and grounded in real-life goals rather than jargon.

She often helps people managing career stress, low self-esteem, and big life changes. Nora also supports those facing compassion fatigue, caregiving strain, and challenges after adoption or foster care experiences. Her practice includes attention to concerns such as codependency, grief, guilt, and recovery from trauma.

Nora says somatic work is a key part of her practice, and she maintains a somatic approach that complements talk-based techniques. That means she pays attention to bodily responses alongside thoughts and feelings when helping people practice new ways of coping.

Clients can expect clear, practical strategies such as breathing and grounding exercises, behavior-focused experiments, and step-by-step problem solving. Nora frames progress as small, steady changes that add up over time. She works in English and provides care from California.

Practical approaches for online care

CBT focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing new behaviors. It helps with anxiety, panic, low mood, and stress by breaking problems into small, manageable steps that you can practice between sessions.

Somatic therapy pays attention to body sensations and how they relate to feelings and behavior. This approach can be useful for trauma, panic, and chronic stress by teaching simple body-based practices to reduce intensity and improve regulation.

Finding the best approach is a collaborative process. Nora will work with each person to try techniques, notice what helps, and adjust methods based on goals and preferences rather than using a single fixed plan.

Online therapy offers flexibility in how people meet. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and guided exercises, phone sessions require less bandwidth, live chat can be a quick check-in, and text-based messaging supports ongoing reflection between appointments. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life while trying different techniques and building steady habits.