About Portia
Portia Anderson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with 19 years of clinical experience. She helps people facing stress, anxiety, mood changes, trauma, addiction, and concerns around relationships and intimacy. Her style is straightforward and practical, aiming to reduce daily strain and improve relationships over time.
Portia combines several approaches to meet each person where they are. She uses attachment-based ideas to look at how early bonds affect current relationships.
How Portia works
She draws on cognitive behavioral techniques to identify unhelpful thoughts and build new habits. Dialectical behavior therapy skills are used for managing strong emotions and improving day-to-day coping. Her practice also includes narrative and psychodynamic ways of working to understand patterns that repeat across a person’s life.
These approaches help people make sense of past experiences and change long-standing patterns. Portia applies trauma-informed methods when trauma or abuse is part of the story. She also supports people dealing with addiction and dual diagnosis, caregiver stress, family of origin concerns, codependency, and issues tied to adoption or foster care.
Portia acknowledges social and systemic factors like racism, gender, and LGBT concerns when they affect a person’s wellbeing. Portia practices in California and conducts sessions in English. She offers a mix of video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to fit different needs.
To begin, a person completes a short matching questionnaire and schedules sessions based on therapist availability.
Portia lists 7 ways of working on the entry:
What Portia works with
The areas below are the ones Portia selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Paranoia
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Training and background
| Register | LMFT |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 19 |
| 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
Approaches that translate to online care
Attachment-based work looks at how early connections shape current relationships and aims to build safer, more reliable ways of relating. It can help when trust, closeness, or patterns from childhood show up in adult life. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, focuses on noticing unhelpful thoughts and testing them with practical experiments to change feelings and behavior. CBT is useful for anxiety, depression, and daily worry.Finding the right approach is part of the work. Portia will collaborate with each person to pick methods that fit their goals, needs, and preferences. That means trying skills-based work, exploring life stories, or combining methods over time based on what helps most.
Online therapy offers flexibility and different ways to connect. Video calls allow face-to-face conversations when a longer session is needed. Phone sessions can work when bandwidth is limited or a camera is not wanted. Live chat and text-based messaging are useful for shorter check-ins, pacing therapy over the week, or keeping momentum between longer sessions. These options make it easier to schedule care around work, family, and daily life.
Start online instead of waiting
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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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