About Lisa
Lisa Whittingham is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor with 15 years of experience in Illinois. She focuses on helping people facing stress, anxiety, grief, relationship and parenting concerns. She speaks English and Italian and works with adults who need steady, practical support.
Her style is warm and down-to-earth. Sessions focus on clear goals and small, useful steps. She listens first, then helps people try methods that fit their daily lives.
How Lisa works
Work often includes building coping skills, improving communication, and restoring self-worth. Lisa uses several evidence-based approaches to guide sessions. She draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to spot unhelpful thinking patterns and create alternative responses.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy tools help with emotion regulation and distress tolerance. EMDR and trauma-focused methods are used when past events are getting in the way of current life. Clients who come to her for parenting, career stress, chronic illness, or caregiver strain get practical strategies and emotional support.
She also addresses eating and sleep problems, anger, intimacy issues, and challenges linked to attachment or abandonment. Sessions can include coaching elements to help people make concrete life changes. People describe her approach as collaborative and steady.
She helps clients set realistic goals and track progress. The work is paced to each person’s needs, with attention to strengths as well as struggles.
Lisa lists 5 ways of working on the entry:
What Lisa works with
The areas below are the ones Lisa 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
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trauma and abuse
- Trichotillomania
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Register | LCPC |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 15 |
| Languages | English, Italian |
| 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 specific approaches work online
Lisa uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people notice and change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. In a session that might mean working on a worry thought, testing it with small experiments, and practicing new actions to reduce anxiety. Dialectical Behavior Therapy offers concrete skills for handling strong emotions and improving relationships, with practice of techniques like grounding, emotion regulation, and clear communication. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is offered for people whose past traumatic events keep interfering with today; it involves focused work on distressing memories to reduce their hold on daily life.Choosing the best approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk through goals, preferences, and what has or has not helped in the past. Together they decide whether CBT, DBT skills, EMDR, or another method makes the most sense and adjust the plan as progress is made.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video sessions allow face-to-face conversation and guided exercises. Phone sessions can be useful when bandwidth is limited or for a shorter check-in. Live chat and text messaging support quick coaching, check-ins between sessions, and ongoing reflection. These options aim to make therapy more flexible and easier to fit into work, caregiving, or travel schedules.
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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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