Michele Bonanno, LMHC

Michele Bonanno is a licensed mental health counselor who helps people manage stress, anxiety, trauma, low self-esteem, depression, and relationship concerns. She brings over 32 years of clinical experience and focuses on practical steps that make daily life easier. Michele writes plainly and listens closely to each person’s story. Her sessions focus on clear goals and skills people can use between meetings. She draws on cognitive behavioral techniques to spot unhelpful thinking and change behavior. Michele also uses acceptance and commitment methods to help clients tolerate hard feelings while building a values-based life. Michele takes a person-centered stance in sessions. That means she prioritizes each client’s pace and preferences. She works with emotional pain like grief, trauma, and compassion fatigue, and addresses patterns such as codependency, attachment struggles, and difficulty with intimacy. She supports people facing practical life stresses as well, including parenting strain, career transitions, chronic illness, and caregiving challenges. Michele also assists with attention concerns, addictions, sleep and eating problems, and bipolar spectrum issues. Her style is straightforward, calm, and focused on what will help now. Clients can expect structured sessions that combine skill teaching with space to process emotions. Michele helps people build coping tools, set realistic goals, and practice changes between sessions. Her long experience informs a steady, adaptable approach aimed at improving everyday functioning.

Approach and online session options

CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy, helps people notice patterns of thinking that lead to distress and then practice different thoughts and behaviors to reduce symptoms and improve functioning. It is often used for anxiety, depression, ADHD-related challenges, and sleep or eating concerns.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on accepting difficult feelings while clarifying personal values and taking committed steps toward those values. ACT can support coping with grief, chronic illness, trauma reactions, and major life changes.

Attachment-based work looks at how early and current relationship patterns affect emotions and closeness. This approach can help people struggling with intimacy issues, abandonment concerns, attachment problems, and codependency by identifying relational patterns and trying new ways of relating.

Finding the right approach is part of therapy. Michele will collaborate with each person to choose methods that match goals, needs, and preferences. Together they review what helps, try techniques in session, and adjust the plan based on progress.

Online therapy offers flexible ways to connect. Video calls let people use visual cues and longer sessions for deeper work, phone sessions require less bandwidth for clearer audio, and live chat or text messaging can fit brief check-ins, daily coaching, or times when typing is easier than talking. These options make it simpler to work around work schedules, caregiving duties, or mobility limitations while focusing on the same therapeutic approaches used in face-to-face care.