Peggy Lingard , LCSW

Peggy Lingard is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with forty years of experience helping people navigate big life shifts. She offers calm, straightforward support for stress, anxiety, grief, depression, relationship pain, and questions about identity and purpose. Peggy practices in California and works in English.

Her approach is practical and collaborative. Peggy focuses on building a strong working relationship first. She listens, reflects what she hears, and helps clients turn words into small, doable actions. She draws on tools from cognitive behavioral approaches and mindfulness to help people manage mood and stress in daily life.

Peggy also uses ideas from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help clients clarify values and commit to meaningful steps. She incorporates Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills when people are overwhelmed by emotions, and she uses elements of the Gottman Method when relationship patterns are part of the concern. The chosen methods depend on what the person wants to work on.

She has worked with a wide range of concerns across adult life - from coping with midlife and career decisions to grief, addictions, and trauma-related struggles. Peggy names multicultural awareness and LGBTQ issues among the areas she attends to in her work, and she speaks openly about how life roles and identities shape relationships and resilience.

Sessions aim to help people notice strengths, reduce painful patterns, and try new ways of coping. Peggy encourages practical experiments between meetings and checks progress together so goals stay relevant and achievable.

Therapeutic approaches and online care

Peggy often uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help people clarify what matters to them and take small actions that align with their values. ACT can be useful for people struggling with depression, anxiety, or a sense of emptiness by shifting focus from avoidance to meaningful activity.

She also draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to identify unhelpful thoughts and try practical behavior changes. CBT helps with mood disorders, panic attacks, and stress by breaking problems into manageable steps and testing new ways of thinking and acting.

Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work. Peggy will collaborate with each person to choose methods that match their goals and comfort level, adjusting strategies as progress is tracked together.

Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy fit different schedules. Video is helpful for longer sessions and face-to-face conversation, phone calls can work when less bandwidth is needed, and chat or messaging can support brief check-ins or ongoing reflections between appointments. These options aim to make consistent care more flexible and easier to stick with.