Susan Garner
Compassionate guidance for family and relationship challenges
- Credentials
- LMFT
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed in
- California, Oregon
- Languages
- English
- Format
- Online sessions
About Susan
Susan Garner is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) who focuses on family and parenting concerns alongside relationship and life-stress issues. She helps people facing anxiety, depression, grief, anger, trauma, intimacy problems, and the challenges of major life changes. Her work also includes attention to ADHD, bipolar mood concerns, and career-related stress.
Susan brings 20 years of clinical experience to sessions and practices in California. Susan’s style is straightforward and practical.
Background and approach
She listens first, then helps clients name goals and set small, manageable steps. Sessions are conversational and grounded in clear skills you can use between meetings. She aims to make therapy feel useful from the start.
Her approach draws on both emotion-focused and cognitive methods. That means she helps people understand patterns in relationships and also works on changing unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. Mindfulness practices and attachment-based thinking are woven into her work when they fit the client’s needs.
Susan often helps couples and individuals untangle family-of-origin issues, blended family dynamics, communication problems, and struggles around abandonment or jealousy. She also addresses body image, codependency, infidelity, and midlife transitions. She uses familiar language and remains focused on practical outcomes you can measure.
Susan holds California and Oregon licensure as a marriage and family therapist. She draws on both western therapies like CBT and psychodynamic ideas, and on mindfulness-based practices from eastern traditions. The goal is to find what helps each person move forward.
How Susan’s Approaches Work Online
Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on patterns in close relationships. It helps people notice how early bonds shape reactions today and supports building safer, more stable connections. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at the thoughts and behaviors that keep problems going and teaches practical strategies to change them. Emotionally-Focused Therapy concentrates on feelings in relationships and helps partners or family members express needs and respond differently to each other.Choosing the right approach is part of the work. Susan will talk with each person about goals, history, and current concerns and then recommend methods that fit. She treats the choice as a collaboration and adjusts the plan as progress unfolds.
Online therapy offers flexible ways to meet. Video calls let you see one another and work through relationship or family patterns in real time. Phone sessions provide an easier option on busy days. Live chat and text-based messaging give ongoing access for brief check-ins, questions, or skills practice between meetings. These formats make it easier to keep therapy consistent while fitting into family schedules and daily life.
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.
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
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Jealousy
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- California, Oregon
- Languages
- English
Next step
Talk to Susan
- Takes a few minutes
- Nothing to set up just to look
- Stop at any point