Shayna Schaefer , LCSW

Shayna Schaefer is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 28 years of practice in Delaware. She focuses on helping people build self-love, strengthen communication, and manage major life changes. Her style is warm and collaborative, with attention to everyday concerns.

She works with a broad range of emotional struggles, including stress, anxiety, depression, grief, and relationship and intimacy-related issues. She also helps with parenting challenges, eating concerns, ADHD, bipolar mood management, and responses to trauma and abuse. These areas often overlap, so she looks at the whole picture.

Sessions are grounded in practical methods that people can use between meetings. She draws on evidence-informed approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Client-Centered techniques. Mindfulness and existential ideas also shape how she helps people find meaning and cope with change.

Her work often addresses life transitions such as career shifts, divorce and separation, adoption and foster care concerns, aging or caregiving stress, and the fallout from abandonment or attachment wounds. She guides clients toward clearer communication, healthier boundaries, and improved coping skills.

Shayna offers support in English and Spanish. People who choose her often want a steady, empathetic guide as they work toward stronger self-esteem and better relationships. She aims to make therapy understandable and relevant to everyday life.

Therapeutic Approaches for Online Support

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on clarifying what matters most to a person and building actions that align with those values while allowing uncomfortable feelings to exist without getting in the way. It can be helpful for anxiety, stress, and life transitions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) looks at how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors interact and teaches specific skills to change unhelpful patterns, which often helps with anxiety, depression, and coping skills. Client-Centered Therapy emphasizes a nonjudgmental, empathetic relationship where the therapist listens deeply and follows the client's pace, supporting self-direction and personal insight.

Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with each person to decide which methods fit their goals, needs, and preferences. That process may combine elements of ACT, CBT, mindfulness, and client-centered work so the plan matches what the client hopes to achieve.

Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy more flexible. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation, phone sessions can fit a break at work or require less bandwidth, live chat works well for quick check-ins, and text messaging supports ongoing reflection between meetings. These options help people access consistent support while balancing everyday responsibilities.