About Tara
Tara Porphy is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in New Jersey with ten years of experience. She focuses on practical, everyday concerns like stress, anxiety, parenting strain, and coping with life changes. Her style is straightforward and flexible to meet what each person needs in the moment.
Tara draws from several therapeutic approaches to tailor sessions to the person in front of her. She often uses cognitive behavioral strategies to identify unhelpful thinking and build different habits.
How Tara works
She also brings attachment-informed ideas to help people understand emotional patterns that come from important relationships. Her past roles include work in residential programs where she ran groups and provided individual and family-based counseling. That work included supporting people facing substance use and co-occurring mental health issues and offering guidance to their family members.
She has experience providing care in homes, offices, residential settings, and through telehealth. Tara has supported people dealing with trauma, grief, depression, panic and self-harm, as well as those with intellectual or developmental disabilities, including autism. She has worked with children and teens in home-based settings, and also helps parents manage the daily demands of caregiving and family life.
Sessions are shaped to fit each situation, mixing motivational interviewing, psychoeducation, mindfulness, and client-centered listening. People can expect a collaborative tone, clear goals, and practical tools to use between sessions.
Tara lists 10 ways of working on the entry:
What Tara works with
The areas below are the ones Tara selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Parenting issues
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Emptiness
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Trichotillomania
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Register | LPC |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 10 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | New Jersey |
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
Attachment-based work focuses on how early and important relationships shape emotional responses and close connections. In sessions this can mean looking at patterns in relationships and practicing new ways to ask for support or set boundaries. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, helps identify unhelpful thoughts and replace them with clearer, more useful thinking, which often reduces anxiety and improves mood. Client-centered therapy emphasizes listening without judgment and building the session around the person's own goals and experiences.Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will discuss goals, preferences, and daily challenges to decide which methods to try first. Plans are adjusted over time based on what helps most, and clients are invited to give feedback about what feels useful.
Online therapy offers several practical benefits. Video calls let people meet face-to-face from wherever they are, while phone sessions can fit into a break at work or require less bandwidth. Live chat and text-based messaging work well for short check-ins, moment-to-moment support, or keeping therapy going when schedules are tight. These options make it easier to maintain consistency and keep progress moving forward.
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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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