Astra Barkley, LPC, LCMHC

Astra Barkley is a licensed professional counselor who uses clear, practical methods to help people feel steadier. She holds LPC and LCMHC credentials and draws on 12 years of counseling experience to support clients facing stress, anxiety, depression, and life transitions.

Astra favors an integrative approach that mixes practical skill-building with a focus on each person's goals. She often uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to address unhelpful thinking and behavior patterns. Her sessions aim to teach tools that can be used between meetings to reduce symptoms and increase daily functioning.

Her background includes work in nonprofit programs, schools, state agencies, and private practice. That range shaped her skill at helping people navigate systems and access resources. She has supported concerns such as attention challenges, grief, trauma and abuse, addictions, bipolar mood swings, and relationship and family stress.

Astra also brings experience as a foster and adoptive parent and as an advocate for foster families and children. She teaches at the college level and is enrolled in a counselor education and supervision doctoral program, which keeps her approach informed by ongoing study.

In sessions she aims to create straightforward plans that fit each person's life and culture. She pays attention to multicultural concerns and works with clients to set realistic, measurable steps toward their goals.

How Astra’s approaches translate to online therapy

Astra commonly uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people identify unhelpful thoughts and test new behaviors; this approach works well online when clients practice skills between sessions. She also uses Client-Centered Therapy, which focuses on listening and reflecting so people feel heard and can set their own goals; that kind of supportive conversation adapts naturally to video or phone meetings. Motivational Interviewing appears in her work when people need help finding internal reasons to change and build small, practical steps toward those goals.

Finding the right mix of approaches is collaborative. Astra will work with each person to choose techniques that match their needs, goals, and preferences. Early sessions often focus on practical goals and experimenting with methods to see what fits best.

Online therapy options include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and skill coaching, phone sessions can be a good fit when bandwidth is limited, live chat helps with quick check-ins, and text messaging supports ongoing reflection and shorter updates between sessions. These formats give flexibility to schedule around work, school, or caregiving responsibilities.