About Jennifer
Jennifer Forbes is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) based in Illinois. She has practiced for 14 years and founded Seed of Hope Counseling Services to offer practical support during hard times. She helps people navigate relationship strain, parenting challenges, and issues around intimacy.
She also supports people facing trauma and abuse, grief, addictions, stress, anxiety, and depression. Jennifer addresses sleep problems, career concerns, self-esteem, and coping with life changes as well.
How Jennifer works
Her background includes work in both nonprofit and personal sectors since 2009. She has provided counseling, consulting, supervision, and program development for clinical teams and community services. Jennifer has helped design and assess crisis and trauma programs in community settings.
Jennifer trained at Northern Illinois University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Master of Science in Applied Family and Child Studies with a specialization in Marriage and Family Therapy. She has served on clinical committees in Illinois and is a member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.
In sessions she draws on client-centered work and practical approaches such as cognitive behavioral ideas, motivational interviewing, narrative techniques, and solution-focused strategies. Her style tends to be collaborative and goal-oriented, with a focus on what changes feel useful to each person.
Parents reading on a phone will find clear, straightforward help here: concrete tools, steady guidance, and a focus on small, usable steps toward feeling better.
Jennifer lists 6 ways of working on the entry:
What Jennifer works with
The areas below are the ones Jennifer selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- LGBT
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Blended family issues
- Career difficulties
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Immigration issues
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Multicultural concerns
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self esteem
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Stress, Anxiety
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Register | LMFT |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 14 |
| 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
Approaches that translate well to online care
Client-centered therapy focuses on listening and understanding each person's experience and priorities. It helps when someone needs a therapist who reflects their concerns and guides them at their own pace. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, looks at patterns of thought and behavior and teaches practical skills for managing anxiety, mood, sleep, and everyday stressors. It tends to include short exercises and clear homework tasks that work well between sessions. Motivational interviewing is a collaborative way to address change-related goals, such as reducing substance use or shifting habits, by drawing out a person's own motivation and next steps.Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work together. The therapist will collaborate with each person to pick methods that match their goals, preferences, and the issues at hand. That might mean trying an approach for a few sessions and adjusting as needed so the plan feels useful and realistic.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video calls allow real-time face-to-face conversation, while phone sessions can fit a break at work or when bandwidth is limited. Live chat and text sessions are useful for brief check-ins, processing between longer sessions, or when writing feels easier. These options make it simpler to schedule ongoing care and to use therapeutic techniques between meetings.
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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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