Kathleen Griffin

Kathleen Griffin is a licensed clinician in Illinois who helps people facing relationship strain, low self-esteem, career uncertainty, grief, anxiety, and anger. She aims to make the first step toward change feel more manageable and less intimidating. Her approach is warm and respectful and focused on practical support.

Kathleen uses short, direct conversations to clarify what matters most to each person. She listens for patterns that keep problems repeating and works with clients to try new ways of responding. Sessions are collaborative and paced to match each person’s comfort level.

Her work draws on methods like acceptance and commitment ideas, attachment-focused thinking, client-centered listening, cognitive-behavioral techniques, and skills from dialectical behavior approaches. Kathleen adapts these methods to the problem at hand rather than following a single script. She explains steps in plain language and checks in often about how things are going.

People come to Kathleen for help with life transitions, parenting stress, compassion fatigue, sleep problems, trauma and abuse recovery, intimacy-related concerns, and mood differences such as depression or bipolar symptoms. She also supports those dealing with identity and LGBT questions, adoption and foster care issues, and complicated grief.

Kathleen invites clients to set clear, realistic goals and to experiment with small changes between sessions. She emphasizes steady progress and practical tools people can use day to day. The work centers on improving how clients relate to themselves and the people around them.

Therapeutic approaches and how they fit online

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages noticing inner thoughts and feelings without getting stuck in them, then choosing actions that match personal values; it can help with anxiety, low mood, and anger by shifting focus toward meaningful goals. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) looks at how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors interact and uses practical exercises to change unhelpful patterns; this approach is often useful for stress, anxiety, sleep problems, and low self-esteem. Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on how past and present relationships shape expectations and reactions, and it can be helpful for intimacy issues and relationship patterns.

Finding the best approach is part of the process. The therapist will work together with each person to choose or combine methods based on needs, goals, and comfort. That collaborative decision making helps tailor the work to what actually helps the individual.

Confirm the specific online session options before scheduling, as formats are not listed here. In general, online therapy can make it easier to fit sessions into a busy week, allow shorter check-ins when needed, and remove travel time so people can keep appointments around work or caregiving. Online work still focuses on practical tools, skill practice, and real-world experiments that can be used between sessions.