Lara Ashbaugh
Calm, practical help for everyday parenting stress
- Credentials
- LPC
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed in
- Missouri
- Languages
- English
- Format
- Online sessions
About Lara
Lara Ashbaugh is a licensed professional counselor (LPC) who uses practical, evidence-based approaches to help people manage stress, anxiety, and life transitions. She draws on cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy to teach skills for coping with hard moments. Her style is warm and interactive, and she focuses on concrete tools rather than labels.
She brings ten years of clinical experience and has worked with a wide range of concerns.
Background and approach
These include depression, grief, self-esteem, addictions, trauma and abuse, ADHD, bipolar, and parenting challenges. She also addresses issues such as career stress, anger, compassion fatigue, and sexual health topics like BDSM and kink when clients raise them. In sessions she helps clients notice what matters to them and build small, doable habits toward those values.
That can mean learning new ways to respond to strong emotions, practicing mindfulness, or restructuring unhelpful thoughts. She also uses dialectical behavior therapy techniques to strengthen coping skills and relationships. Lara pays attention to strengths and what is already working.
She combines structured strategies with open listening so each plan fits the person in front of her. She avoids stigmatizing labels and treats people with respect and sensitivity. For someone ready to change, she offers steady support and practical coaching.
The first step is a short match and scheduling process that leads to the right format for ongoing work.
Therapeutic approaches suited to online care
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps people notice what matters to them and commit to small actions that reflect those values. It emphasizes present-moment awareness and practical behavior change for issues like anxiety, depression, and coping with life transitions.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on identifying patterns of thinking that feed distress and testing new, more helpful thoughts and behaviors. It is useful for stress, mood difficulties, and many common symptoms where changing responses makes a difference.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) provides concrete skills for managing strong emotions, improving relationships, and tolerating distress. It is often used alongside mindfulness and CBT techniques to build steady coping tools.
Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what has or has not helped before. Together they decide which methods to try and adjust them as work progresses.
Online therapy offers flexibility through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. These options make it easier to fit sessions into busy days and to continue work during life changes. Licensed professionals can teach the same ACT, CBT, and DBT skills remotely so clients can practice them between sessions and build lasting routines.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Less about arguing with difficult thoughts, more about loosening their grip and acting on what matters to you anyway. Values and committed action carry the work, which suits conversation at a distance.
Client-Centered Therapy
The direction comes from you rather than from a set programme. The therapist offers a warm, non-judgemental space to think out loud and work at your own pace. Online, this rests on the relationship rather than on being in the same room.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT looks at the link between what you think, how you feel, and what you do. You work on noticing unhelpful patterns and practising steadier responses. It suits online sessions well, because much of the work happens between appointments and can be talked through from anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Emptiness
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- Gender dysphoria
- Guilt and shame
- Hearing impaired
- HIV / AIDS
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-harm
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed
- Missouri
- Languages
- English
Next step
Talk to Lara
- Takes a few minutes
- Nothing to set up just to look
- Stop at any point