About Courtney
Courtney Surigao is a licensed clinical mental health counselor with 18 years of experience. She uses client-centered care to help people work through relationship pain, grief, parenting challenges, anxiety, depression, and trauma. Her approach aims to help clients feel heard and build practical steps toward change.
Courtney focuses on clear, attainable goals. She draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to identify unhelpful thoughts and change behaviors. She also uses Solution-Focused and Narrative ideas to highlight strengths and rewrite difficult stories into manageable next steps.
How Courtney works
Sessions often include conversational work and simple exercises to practice between meetings. Clients may be asked to try short activities, worksheets, or real-life experiments that reinforce progress. This is collaborative work that asks for honest effort and small risks to shift patterns.
Her background includes long-term clinical experience supporting people facing family problems, adoption and foster care issues, blended family concerns, and caregiver stress. She also addresses chronic pain, body image, eating and sleeping problems, and end-of-life and hospice counseling. Courtney brings steadiness to emotionally charged topics like anger, guilt, shame, intimacy concerns, and isolation.
She helps people clarify values, name sources of pain, and make step-by-step plans toward better functioning and greater hope.
Courtney lists 5 ways of working on the entry:
What Courtney works with
The areas below are the ones Courtney selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
- Grief
Also listed
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Stress, Anxiety
- Trauma and abuse
- Trichotillomania
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Register | LCMHC |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 18 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | North Carolina |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
How therapeutic approaches translate to online care
Courtney commonly uses Client-Centered Therapy to create a collaborative, empathetic space where the client sets the pace and focus. This approach helps when someone needs to feel understood and build trust before making changes. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is also a regular part of her work; it focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing new behaviors to reduce anxiety, depression, and stress.Choosing the best approach is part of the first sessions. Courtney will work together with the client to pick methods that fit their goals, values, and daily life. She often blends approaches and adjusts the plan as progress, feedback, and changing needs become clear.
Online sessions offer practical flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation when visual cues matter. Phone sessions use less bandwidth and can be easier to fit into a busy schedule. Live chat and text-based messaging are useful for brief check-ins, homework support, or when written reflection helps. These options make it easier to keep regular contact and practice changes between sessions.
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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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