Leonard Burns
Californian therapist focused on steady, practical care
- Credentials
- LMFT
- Experience
- 35 years
- Licensed in
- California
- Languages
- English
- Format
- Online sessions
About Leonard
Leonard Burns is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with decades of experience helping people navigate stress, anxiety, grief, relationship struggles, and parenting worries. He brings steady, practical support when life feels overwhelming or when identity and intimacy raise hard questions. Sessions focus on building a clear working relationship so real change can begin.
He has practiced in California since 1990 and draws on a mix of family systems, psychodynamic ideas, and trauma work.
Background and approach
Leonard uses tools from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy alongside attachment-focused approaches. He also has experience with EMDR for people with trauma history. Leonard aims to make sessions straightforward.
He listens carefully, helps clients set concrete goals, and teaches strategies for managing difficult feelings. He balances emotional understanding with practical steps that can be used between meetings. Clients who have worked with him have included people coping with complex post-traumatic stress, depression, cancer survivorship issues, and identity-related stress.
He emphasizes the importance of a trusting, honest therapeutic relationship as the foundation for change. He frames therapy as a partner journey. Leonard acknowledges that change can be scary and difficult and offers steady support while clients try new ways of coping.
His work is grounded in long clinical experience and a belief that commitment to the process makes progress possible.
Approaches that translate well to online care
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, helps people notice difficult thoughts and emotions without getting stuck in them and then move toward meaningful actions. It can be useful for anxiety, depression, and coping with life changes. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, focuses on identifying unhelpful thought patterns and testing new behaviors; it is practical and often teaches skills for managing mood and sleep. Attachment-Based Therapy looks at patterns in close relationships and helps people understand and change habits that cause pain in their connections.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will listen to goals, try different techniques, and adjust based on what feels most helpful. Together the client and therapist decide which methods to emphasize so therapy fits the person's needs and pace.
Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to provide flexibility. This makes it easier to fit therapy around work, caregiving, or medical appointments. Using these formats, clinicians can teach skills, review homework, and hold focused conversations from wherever a client is located in California.
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.
Attachment-Based Therapy
Looks at how early bonds shaped what you expect from closeness, and how that plays out now with a partner, a parent, or your own children.
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.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Cancer
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Traumatic brain injury
- Visually impaired
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Existential Therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Jungian Therapy
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 35 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English
Next step
Talk to Leonard
- Takes a few minutes
- Nothing to set up just to look
- Stop at any point