Ingrid Nelson Stefl, LMSW

Being human has its emotional challenges and whether you feel bothered by recent events or it has more to do with loss, depression, or anxiety, I can help you.

The relationship between a client and therapist is extremely important and something I care a lot about; building a trusting, therapeutic relationship is one of my strengths. I have knowledge and experience helping people who are struggling with depression, anxiety, ADHD, relationship issues, people-pleasing tendencies, difficulties standing up for themselves, suffering from some of the effects of a history of trauma, trouble adjusting to stressors, and having unwanted angry outbursts to name the main areas and some of the issues I've helped people with. It is important that you are treated in such a way that you feel comfortable with and accepted and understood by me. While there are many similarities among us humans, of course each of us is also a unique individual and your therapy goals and objectives and the way treatment proceeds will be developed with your input and designed to fit you and is something that we will also review together and change as needed. When I started my career in January 1983, I had a strong desire to keep learning and have attended a great many conferences, then I was trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) in 2012 from a week-long conference and a two-day follow-up and in 2013 participated in and successfully completed a ten-month training in Parent Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) which I love doing! My trainer encouraged me to complete the test in order to get certified in PCIT, but I have not done that so far for reasons. Both of those therapies were developed based on research results, which has been becoming increasingly the direction the field of mental health treatment has been going and is bringing us more tools and methods than we could have dreamed of having back in the 1970's and even '80's. I have participated in eight to nine months of training in Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT) which is designed to be used with children and adolescents and has been modified by individual therapists to be appropriate for adults but has important limitations with that population. In June of this year (2022) I completed a two and one-half day webinar about treating trauma using the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Model, which impressed me in its beliefs, methods, and results and inspired me in terms of how much more help can be offered to people that actually works. IFS seems to be one of the most effective ways, if not the best way, to help adults to heal from trauma and to help people to change themselves in a more lasting way. I am pursuing the IFS Level One training, but the demand is much higher than the supply so this is taking time. So, while I appreciate and still incorporate aspects of psychodynamic psychotherapy into my work with clients, I prefer the evidence-based types including Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and also fit in parts of DBT, Motivational Interviewing, TF-CBT, and now IFS. All of my work currently is one-on-one with adults of all ages. I have worked with children and adolescents throughout my career until Covid, at that time transitioned three child clients to online therapy with a great deal of cooperation from their parents and still did some good work, but discovered that children really do need in-person therapy. I've done online therapy with adolescents, too, but prefer in-person work with them as well and for reasons. I hope to return to in-person sessions at least with some clients in the future although most of the people I'm working with right now have said that they like the convenience of being able to meet from home or work without having to drive to their appointments. Once I'm comfortable health-wise with resuming in-person visits, I'll start accepting clients who are children and teens again. In my experience, online therapy tends to work very well with adults who are able to secure privacy for themselves. For my last point, it is important to mention, that I will refer a client of mine to someone else if we aren't a good fit or I don't have the particular knowledge or skills that they need and if I can't obtain them relatively easily, with an obvious example being if someone wanted Eye-Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and I'm not trained in it; I am honest about my strengths and limitations.