Susan Lipkin
Compassionate support for family and parenting challenges
- Credentials
- LISW
- Experience
- 36 years
- Licensed in
- Ohio
- Languages
- English
- Format
- Online sessions
About Susan
Susan Lipkin is a licensed independent social worker who focuses on family and parenting concerns along with stress, anxiety, and relationship struggles. She keeps sessions practical and to the point. She listens first, then helps people make choices that fit their lives.
Her demeanor is warm and nonjudgmental, and she aims to create a straightforward space to talk through problems. Susan has been a licensed clinical social worker since 1988 and holds the LISW credential.
Background and approach
She has 36 years of professional experience across settings, including independent practice, community mental health centers, psychiatric hospitals, and veterans' services. That range helps her draw on many tools when a single method doesn’t fit. Her usual approach begins with client-centered listening to learn what already helps.
She also uses cognitive behavioral therapy when it matches a person’s needs and has training in mindfulness, motivational interviewing, and narrative techniques. Susan adapts methods over time as goals and challenges change. She has extensive work with people who have survived sexual and physical abuse and with those coping with traumatic experiences.
She also has long experience assisting people facing domestic violence, infertility-related stress, and aging-related concerns. Many clients come for help with depression, grief, parenting tensions, and life transitions. Susan emphasizes collaboration and practical steps.
Conversations often include clear strategies, short exercises, and reflections that connect to daily life. She aims to help people find sustainable ways to handle stress, communicate more effectively, and move forward with clearer choices.
Approaches you can use in online sessions
Susan commonly blends client-centered work with cognitive behavioral therapy. Client-centered work means the therapist listens closely and follows what matters to the person. It helps when someone needs a respectful space to sort priorities and make their own decisions. Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on specific thoughts and behaviors and helps with anxiety, depression, and clear day-to-day problems.She also draws on mindfulness and motivational interviewing as needed. Mindfulness teaches simple attention and breathing practices to reduce stress. Motivational interviewing helps people find their own reasons to change and build on small successes. Together these approaches give practical options rather than a single path forward.
Finding the right mix is part of the work. The therapist will discuss goals and preferences and try methods that fit those needs. Sessions are collaborative and adjusted over time if something isn’t working.
Online sessions use video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to fit different schedules. That flexibility makes it easier to get consistent support from home or work, and to use short check-ins or longer sessions depending on what’s needed.
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.
Mindfulness Therapy
Attention training: noticing thoughts and physical feelings as they arrive without being carried off by them. Much of it is practice you do yourself, so guidance over video or audio works much as it would in person.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Family conflicts
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- Grief
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 36 years
- Licensed
- Ohio
- Languages
- English
Next step
Talk to Susan
- Takes a few minutes
- Nothing to set up just to look
- Stop at any point