About Susan
Susan VanHuizen is a licensed master social worker with 20 years of clinical experience in Michigan. She focuses on practical skills to reduce anxiety, manage stress, and address addictions while helping people build stronger self-esteem and cope with life changes. Her work often centers on everyday struggles like depression, overwhelming stress, and recovery from substance use.
She also helps people facing aging and geriatric issues, chronic pain or illness, and the fallout from major transitions such as divorce or separation.
How Susan works
Susan uses straightforward, skills-based methods to help people gain control over difficult thoughts and behaviors. Sessions usually include learning new coping tools, practicing emotional regulation, and working through patterns that contribute to guilt, shame, or codependency. She draws on approaches such as cognitive behavioral techniques, mindfulness practices, and motivational interviewing to support change.
This mix lets her tailor strategies to problems like isolation, emptiness, money-related stress, and family of origin issues. Susan aims to create a calm, nonjudgmental atmosphere where people can name what feels wrong and figure out what to do next. She helps clients set clear goals, try manageable steps, and adjust plans as progress is made.
Susan lists 4 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
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Women's issues
Training and background
| Register | LMSW |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 20 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Michigan |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
Practical approaches for online change
CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing them against real life. It helps with anxiety, depression, and patterns that keep people stuck by teaching concrete skills to change thinking and behavior.Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, emphasizes emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and improved interpersonal skills. It can be useful for managing intense emotions, reducing impulsive behaviors, and improving day-to-day coping.
Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will listen to your goals and try specific tools to see what fits best. Together you will adjust methods based on what helps you make steady progress.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy flexible. Video is helpful for face-to-face conversation, phone works well when bandwidth is limited, and chat or text is useful for brief check-ins or when typing feels easier. These options let people fit sessions into busy schedules and keep momentum between visits.
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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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