About Susan
Susan St Vrain is a licensed mental health counselor in Washington with 30 years of experience. She helps people navigate stress, anxiety, grief, depression, and major life changes. Her background includes trauma-informed work and a focus on practical, body-aware tools that complement talk therapy.
Susan draws on a mix of approaches to match each person's needs. She uses client-centered listening to understand what matters most. She pairs that with cognitive behavioral techniques to notice thought patterns and acceptance and commitment ideas to clarify values and next steps.
How Susan works
Her practice often includes somatic work, therapeutic yoga, mindfulness, and movement when clients want a body-based way to manage emotions. These methods are offered alongside traditional talk therapy to support healing from abuse, neglect, or stress-related symptoms. Sessions aim to be collaborative and solution focused.
Susan frames the work as a team effort where the client is the expert on their life and she offers guidance, tools, and education. She emphasizes small, manageable steps clients can use between sessions. Over her career she has also worked with concerns like ADHD, caregiver stress, relationship problems, career issues, and compassion fatigue.
The goal is to help people find balance, build coping skills, and reconnect with what matters to them.
Susan lists 9 ways of working on the entry:
What Susan works with
The areas below are the ones Susan selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Somatization
- Traumatic brain injury
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Register | LMHC |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 30 |
| 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 you can use online
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps people clarify what matters to them and take small committed steps toward those values. It emphasizes accepting difficult thoughts while moving toward meaningful action, which can help with anxiety, depression, and major life changes.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on spotting unhelpful thinking and testing new behaviors. It offers concrete tools for managing symptoms like worry, low mood, and sleep problems by changing thought patterns and routines.
Attachment-Based Therapy looks at how past relationships influence current patterns and helps people build healthier ways of relating. This approach can be useful for those working through attachment issues, abandonment, or family of origin concerns.
Finding the right approach is part of the process. The therapist will work together with the client to choose methods that fit their goals, preferences, and daily life. That collaborative decision can change over time as needs evolve.
Online therapy provides practical flexibility. Video calls let people work face to face when convenience matters, phone sessions use less bandwidth and can fit a break at work, live chat offers a shorter check-in option, and text-based messaging supports ongoing coaching between sessions. These formats make it easier to keep therapy consistent around busy schedules.
Start online instead of waiting
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Common questions
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What credential and state licensure does she hold?
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How do I begin working with Susan?
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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