Laura Pengelly
Family-focused therapist and parenting support
- Credentials
- LMFT
- Experience
- 22 years
- Licensed in
- Pennsylvania
- Languages
- English
- Format
- Online sessions
About Laura
Laura Pengelly is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) who offers warm, interactive counseling focused on families and parenting. She meets people where they are and helps them untangle problems in everyday language. Sessions aim to uncover small, practical steps that make daily life feel more manageable.
Parents and family members will find a calm, straightforward approach to common struggles. With 22 years of experience, Laura has helped people with relationship issues, trauma and abuse, mood disorders, and parenting challenges.
Background and approach
She uses approaches that look at thoughts and behaviors, the stories people tell about their lives, and focused problem-solving to find workable changes. That includes support for anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, grief, anger, and issues around intimacy and communication. Laura often works with families facing blended family stress, fatherhood concerns, attachment issues, and young adult transitions.
She also has experience with autism and Asperger Syndrome, Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD), and family-of-origin problems. Her background includes trauma-focused work and many years addressing family and relationship patterns. In sessions she explains tools plainly and practices them together with clients.
She listens to each person’s perspective and helps reframe unhelpful thoughts while suggesting small experiments to try at home. The focus is on finding what actually helps a family function better day to day. Laura practices in Pennsylvania and conducts sessions in English.
She uses evidence-informed methods like cognitive behavioral techniques and trauma-focused work to support change. Her style is respectful, practical, and focused on helping families move forward.
Approaches that translate to online family work
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, focuses on how thoughts and actions affect feelings. It teaches simple tools to change unhelpful thinking and try different behaviors, which can ease anxiety, depression, and parenting stress. Narrative Therapy helps people look at the stories they tell about their family and their role in it. By retelling parts of those stories, clients often find new options for connection and boundaries.Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk with the family about goals, try out techniques, and adjust the plan based on what helps. Clients and the therapist decide together which methods fit best, and they check progress as they go.
Online sessions offer practical flexibility for busy families. Video calls let people meet visually from home, phone sessions allow for quick check-ins, and live chat or text messaging can be used between sessions for brief questions or support. These formats make it easier to fit therapy into work, school, and childcare schedules while still working on relationship and parenting goals.
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.
Narrative Therapy
Looking at the story you have come to tell about yourself, and where it came from. The work is in separating the problem from your identity and finding accounts that fit you better.
Solution-Focused Therapy
Rather than examining the problem at length, this looks at what is already working and builds on it. Sessions tend to be practical and forward-looking, with small achievable steps, which translates readily to shorter online conversations.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Career difficulties
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Intimacy-related issues
- Mood disorders
- Parenting issues
- Self esteem
- Stress, Anxiety
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 22 years
- Licensed
- Pennsylvania
- Languages
- English
Next step
Talk to Laura
- Takes a few minutes
- Nothing to set up just to look
- Stop at any point