About Denise
Denise Gallo is an AASW social worker with 34 years of practice in Australia. She focuses on practical support for stress, anxiety, trauma and abuse, low self-esteem, and coping with major life changes. She speaks English, Italian, French and Spanish and draws on a long career in child protection and community work.
Her style is warm and respectful. She aims to listen first and then shape the conversation around each person's needs.
How Denise works
Sessions are collaborative and paced to suit how someone prefers to talk about difficult subjects. Denise emphasises clear steps you can take between sessions. Denise often uses mindfulness and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy ideas to help people respond to painful thoughts and feelings rather than fight them.
She also works from attachment-based and client-centred perspectives to build safety and trust as the main goal. Narrative techniques may be used to help people reframe troubling life stories. Her background includes extensive work in statutory child protection and lived experience as a parent of six.
That mix of professional and everyday life informs a practical approach to caregiving stress, relationship patterns, abandonment issues, adoption and foster care concerns, and family of origin problems. Sessions can suit people facing compassion fatigue, caregiver stress, body image struggles, or the fallout from separation and domestic violence.
Denise aims for straightforward conversations, doable goals, and steady support as people work through change.
Denise lists 8 ways of working on the entry:
What Denise works with
The areas below are the ones Denise selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Intellectual disability
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Multicultural concerns
- Personality disorders
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Visually impaired
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Training and background
| Register | AASW |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 34 |
| Languages | English, Spanish, French, Italian |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Australia |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
How these approaches work online
Denise commonly blends Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and attachment-based work in sessions. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on noticing painful thoughts and feelings and choosing actions that match your values, which can help with anxiety, stress and life changes. Attachment-based work looks at relationship patterns from early life and helps people understand how those patterns affect current relationships and caregiving roles.She also draws on client-centred listening to prioritise what matters to each person. Finding the right approach is part of the process - Denise will work with you to identify which methods fit your goals and preferences. That collaboration means approaches can be adjusted as progress is made or as needs change.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone, live chat or text-based messaging to make counselling more flexible. Video calls let you see facial cues and body language, phone sessions suit lower bandwidth or shorter check-ins, and messaging or chat can be useful for brief reflections or when writing helps. These formats make it easier to fit therapy around work, caregiving, travel or health constraints while still accessing appropriately qualified therapists.
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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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