About Penny
Penny Gifford is a licensed professional counselor with 30 years of experience helping adults navigate major life stresses and mental health challenges. She practices from California and focuses on building practical skills that people can use right away. Penny aims to make sessions feel collaborative and nonjudgmental so clients can explore change at their own pace.
In sessions she emphasizes clear, workable steps to manage anxiety, depression, addiction, anger, and relationship or family concerns.
How Penny works
She also helps people dealing with grief, body image struggles, sleep and eating difficulties, and the ups and downs of mood disorders. Her work includes support for LGBT concerns, career strain, and coping with life changes. Penny draws on several approaches to tailor care to each person.
She uses client-centered methods to focus on each person’s experience and solution-focused techniques to set short-term goals. Cognitive behavioral strategies and dialectical behavior ideas are combined when helpful to change unhelpful thoughts and build coping skills. Her style is practical and collaborative.
Sessions often include goal setting, skill practice, and review of progress. Penny aims to help people gain self-empowerment and make effective, lasting changes in daily routines and relationships. People who prefer a straightforward, skills-based approach may find her way of working helpful.
She works with adults in individual sessions and supports those facing complex or overlapping concerns by adapting techniques to their needs.
Penny lists 5 ways of working on the entry:
What Penny works with
The areas below are the ones Penny selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Personality disorders
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Trichotillomania
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Registers | LPC, LCPC |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 30 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | California |
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
Client-Centered Therapy focuses on understanding each person’s experience and working at their pace. It helps people feel heard and supports exploration of values, identity, and personal goals. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at the link between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and teaches practical skills to reduce anxiety, depression, and unhelpful habits.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with the client to choose which methods to try first, then adjust techniques based on progress, preferences, and goals. This collaborative process helps shape a plan that fits each person’s situation.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to offer flexibility. Video sessions allow face-to-face conversation and shared exercises, phone sessions can work well when a quieter space is needed or bandwidth is limited, live chat supports quick check-ins, and text messaging is useful for brief reflections or tracking skills between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy schedules while still working toward concrete goals.
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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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