Rachel Bastien-Chilson , LCSW

Rachel Bastien-Chilson is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with eleven years of experience helping people navigate stress, anxiety, grief, low self-esteem, depression, and major life changes. She focuses on Women's issues among other concerns, and offers a steady, compassionate presence for people who feel stuck or overwhelmed.

Rachel keeps sessions grounded and practical. She moves at a pace that feels manageable and avoids rushing to quick fixes. Conversations cover current thoughts, feelings, and relationships, and sometimes touch on earlier experiences when that helps make sense of what is happening now.

Clients can expect a warm and honest space where curiosity and directness balance each other. Rachel brings steady attention, empathy, and occasional lightness to make hard conversations easier to carry. Therapy shifts between reflective work and concrete strategies depending on what is needed.

Her background includes more than a decade in mental health and crisis settings, where she has helped people through intense and complicated situations. That experience informs a collaborative, strengths-based approach that looks for the skills people already have and builds on them.

Rachel works with a broad range of life challenges, including issues tied to adoption and foster care, attachment concerns, caregiver stress, chronic illness and pain, body image, and the effects of aging. She aims to help people find clearer choices, steadier emotion, and a greater sense of agency over daily life.

Evidence-based approaches and online care

Rachel uses evidence-based therapeutic techniques to help people change unhelpful patterns and manage strong emotions. She often blends practical skill-building with reflective work to address anxiety and depression, teaching concrete coping tools that can be practiced between sessions to reduce day-to-day distress.

When grief or attachment concerns are central, Rachel uses sensitive, exploratory approaches that help people make sense of loss and relational patterns. This work focuses on understanding how past experiences show up now and on developing new ways of relating to oneself and others.

Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Rachel will work with each person to identify goals, try methods that fit their needs, and adjust as progress and preferences become clearer. The approach evolves as therapy moves forward so techniques remain useful and relevant.

Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to increase flexibility. Video sessions allow face-to-face conversation for deeper interaction, phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited, live chat supports shorter check-ins, and messaging is useful for ongoing reflections between appointments. These options make it easier to fit therapy into work, caregiving, or medical schedules while maintaining continuity of care.