About Alaina
Alaina Bigger helps people manage stress, anxiety, depression, and grief. She supports those facing relationship and family struggles, parenting challenges, anger, low self-esteem, career changes, and ADHD. Alaina is a licensed clinical social worker practicing in California and Ohio with 14 years of experience as a therapist.
Her style is straightforward and respectful. She sees each person as the expert on their own life and looks for strengths to build on.
How Alaina works
Sessions focus on practical steps that fit into daily life and small changes that add up over time. Alaina draws on a mix of approaches to match each person's needs. She uses techniques that address negative thinking, patterns that repeat in relationships, and how systems like family dynamics affect wellbeing.
She aims for a balanced approach that looks at feelings, thoughts, and behavior. She has worked with concerns that include trauma and abuse, parenting and adoption or foster care issues, blended family challenges, divorce and separation, and multicultural matters. Other focus areas include impulsivity, isolation, seasonal affective disorder, self-harm, social anxiety, and mood disorders.
People can expect clear goals and practical coping tools alongside talk-based reflection. Alaina helps people sort out communication problems, commitment worries, guilt and shame, and forgiveness work. She offers steady support while helping clients test new ways of managing life changes.
What Alaina works with
The areas below are the ones Alaina selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Blended family issues
- Career difficulties
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Parenting issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Registers | LISW, LCSW |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 14 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | California |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
How evidence-based techniques work online
Alaina uses evidence-based techniques that focus on changing thoughts and patterns, understanding past influences, and looking at family or system interactions. Cognitive approaches help identify and shift unhelpful thinking and teach practical skills for anxiety, depression, and mood issues. Psychodynamic-informed work looks at recurring emotional patterns and past relationships to understand current reactions and relieve long-standing stress.She also draws on systemic ideas to see how relationships and family roles affect daily life and decision making. That perspective helps when addressing blended family issues, divorce and separation, parenting concerns, or communication problems. Each approach is explained in plain terms and woven into a shared plan.
Finding the right approach is part of the process. The therapist will collaborate with each person to choose methods that match their goals, preferences, and everyday demands. That means trying a technique, reviewing progress, and adjusting the plan together.
Online therapy offers practical flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues. Phone sessions work well when bandwidth is limited or a quicker check-in fits better. Live chat and text-based messaging let people send thoughts between sessions or fit brief check-ins into a busy schedule. These options help people access therapy in ways that fit their life and routine.
Start online instead of waiting
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Common questions
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A practical next step
Write down two things you would want to be different in six months. That is the most useful thing to bring to a first session, whoever it is with. If you would rather start now than keep reading, online sessions are the quickest route.
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