About Benita
Benita Whitfield helps people facing stress, anxiety, relationship strain, parenting challenges, anger, and low self-esteem. She meets each person where they are and focuses on practical steps to feel steadier and more connected. Benita uses straightforward talk and clear goals so busy parents can use session time well.
She has 26 years of clinical experience and holds LCSW and LICSW credentials. That background informs a calm, steady approach for people dealing with abandonment wounds, attachment struggles, or the complications of adoption and foster care.
How Benita works
She also supports those facing chronic illness, caregiver stress, body image concerns, and communication problems. Benita blends several styles to match what a person needs in the moment. She draws on attachment-based work to examine important relationships and emotionally focused ways to name and shift painful patterns.
Mindfulness and client-centered methods help people build awareness and practical coping skills in everyday life. Sessions focus on useful tools and clear next steps rather than jargon. Benita pays attention to cultural context and life stage, helping people plan small experiments between sessions.
Over time the aim is better emotional regulation, clearer communication, and greater confidence. Her practice includes attention to complex diagnoses and personality patterns such as avoidant or antisocial presentations when those issues are relevant to care. People come for help with commitment worries, co-morbidity, blended family pressures, or workplace stress, and leave with concrete strategies to try.
Benita lists 8 ways of working on the entry:
What Benita works with
The areas below are the ones Benita selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Parenting issues
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Visually impaired
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Registers | LCSW, LICSW |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 26 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Illinois |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
How Benita’s methods translate to online therapy
Benita uses attachment-based work to help people look at important relationships and the patterns that keep them stuck. That approach helps when people want to change how they relate to partners, parents, or close friends by naming interaction cycles and trying different responses.She also draws on client-centered therapy, which focuses on listening and following the person’s lead. This helps clients set their own goals and find solutions that feel right for their life. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, provides concrete emotion regulation and distress-tolerance skills that are useful for anger, anxiety, and intense reactions.
Choosing the right approach is a team effort. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what has or hasn’t worked before. Together they decide whether attachment work, client-centered sessions, DBT skills, or a mix makes the most sense for the issue at hand.
Online therapy offers flexible ways to meet those goals through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. Video is helpful for face-to-face conversation, phone can work for lower bandwidth or a quick check-in, and messaging suits short updates or ongoing support between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy schedule and try different communication styles to see what helps most.
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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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