Laura Pengelly, LMFT

Laura Pengelly is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with 22 years of clinical experience. She uses practical, evidence-informed approaches to help people sort through relationship, mood, and parenting struggles. She speaks plainly and focuses on concrete steps that can be tried between sessions.

Laura centers sessions on what matters most to each person. She listens for how thoughts, behaviors, and past events affect current life. Then she helps people try different strategies to change unhelpful patterns and improve daily functioning. Many clients come for anxiety, depression, grief, anger, or stress related to family and relationships.

Her background includes long-term work with individuals dealing with trauma and mood disorders. She also supports people facing relationship strain, intimacy issues, blended family challenges, and parenting stresses. She has experience with attachment concerns, autism and Asperger syndrome, and young adult issues.

CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, is one of the main approaches she uses to notice and shift thinking and behavior. She also draws on Narrative Therapy to reframe life stories and Solution-Focused Therapy to set small, achievable goals. Trauma-Focused Therapy informs her work with those who have experienced abuse or overwhelming events.

Sessions are offered in English and are scheduled from Pennsylvania. Therapy is delivered through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. The process begins by completing a brief matching questionnaire and scheduling a time that fits the client’s needs.

How therapeutic approaches translate to online care

CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, helps people spot patterns of thinking that make problems worse and practice new behaviors to feel better. It is useful for anxiety, depression, stress, and many day-to-day challenges where changing thoughts and routines makes a difference.

Narrative Therapy focuses on the stories people tell about themselves. It helps separate a person from the problem and creates space to rewrite those stories so choices and values come forward. This is often helpful for identity issues, attachment concerns, and family-of-origin themes.

Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with the client to choose methods that match goals, needs, and personal preferences. Plans are reviewed as therapy progresses so strategies can be adjusted together.

Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make care more flexible. Video calls let people work face to face when that is helpful, phone sessions use less bandwidth, live chat can be a quicker check-in, and messaging supports ongoing reflections between meetings. These options help fit therapy into busy schedules and make it easier to keep continuity over time.