Alison McCandless

Alison McCandless is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who has spent the last three years working in community mental health. She recently relocated to Denver, Colorado and holds licensure in both Illinois and Colorado. Alison's practical work has focused on people facing stress, mood disorders, anxiety, trauma, and everyday life pressures.

Her day-to-day style is straightforward and nonjudgmental. She starts by listening to a person's story and gathering relevant history. From there she builds coping skills and behavioral strategies that match each person's needs and goals.

Alison blends several therapeutic approaches rather than using a single method. She often draws on dialectical behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral techniques to teach skills for managing intense emotions and changing unhelpful thinking. She also uses psychodynamic ideas to help people understand how their past experience shapes present patterns.

She uses a biopsychosocial assessment to get a clear picture of functioning and symptoms. That assessment helps guide practical treatment choices, such as where to focus skill-building and what life stressors need problem-solving.

Her background is in community mental health with low-income populations and people coping with severe stressors, mood and psychotic disorders, trauma, and substance concerns. Alison emphasizes hope and collaboration, and she invites people to consider therapy as a place to make sense of hard experiences and build workable strategies for daily life.

How Alison’s approaches translate to online work

Alison commonly uses dialectical behavior therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy in her work. DBT focuses on building skills for managing intense emotions, improving distress tolerance, and strengthening interpersonal effectiveness. CBT looks at the link between thoughts, feelings, and actions and teaches practical exercises to change unhelpful thinking and behavior.

She also draws on psychodynamic ideas to help people connect past experiences to current patterns. That can mean gently tracking recurring relationship or self-image themes and using that understanding to choose different responses in daily life.

Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Alison will talk with each person about their goals and preferences, try techniques, and adjust the plan over time. She aims to combine skill-building with exploration of personal history when that feels useful.

If you are considering online therapy, confirm which session formats are available before booking. Online work can make it easier to fit appointments into a busy life, reduce travel time, and allow for brief check-ins when a full in-person visit is hard to schedule. Discuss format options and session length during the initial matching step to find what will work best for daily routines and therapeutic goals.