About Michelle
Michelle Goodwater is a licensed mental health counselor (LMHC) in Washington with seven years of clinical experience. She works in a warm, interactive style and focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety, depression, grief, and trauma. Michelle pays attention to relationship and intimacy concerns as well as career strain, sleep problems, and compassion fatigue.
Her approach blends several evidence-based methods into a practical plan tailored to each person. She uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help clients clarify values and take meaningful action.
How Michelle works
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps identify and shift unhelpful thoughts and patterns. She also incorporates client-centered principles to make sessions feel respectful and collaborative. Michelle has supported people through difficult life changes, issues rooted in family of origin, codependency, and problems with guilt or shame.
She also addresses more specific concerns such as abandonment, attachment issues, and certain personality-related patterns. She aims to be direct and compassionate while avoiding stigmatizing labels. Sessions focus on concrete skills, clearer thinking, and steps people can try between appointments.
Michelle works with grief, trauma and abuse, bipolar-related concerns, and intimacy-related issues by building safety and pacing the work to match each person’s readiness. Her style combines practical tools with steady emotional support. For people exploring therapy, she frames the process as a partnership.
Michelle helps set goals, tracks progress, and adjusts strategies over time to make therapy useful and manageable.
Michelle lists 11 ways of working on the entry:
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
What Michelle works with
The areas below are the ones Michelle selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Training and background
| Register | LMHC |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 7 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Washington |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
Therapeutic approaches for online care
Michelle often uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help people name their values and take small, meaningful steps toward them. ACT focuses on accepting difficult feelings while committing to actions that matter, which can help with anxiety, depression, and life changes.She also draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to identify unhelpful thoughts and replace them with more useful patterns. CBT provides clear tools and homework so people can practice new skills between sessions, which is helpful for sleep problems, worry, and mood concerns.
Finding the right approach is part of the work. Michelle will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what feels most helpful. She treats the process as a collaboration and adjusts methods over time to match progress and comfort level.
Online therapy offers practical flexibility. Video calls let the therapist and client see each other for deeper connection. Phone sessions are useful when bandwidth is limited or a shorter check-in fits better. Live chat and text-based messaging support ongoing coaching, quick coping strategies, and touchpoints between longer sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life while still using the same therapeutic methods.
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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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