I have 19 years of experience helping adults in crisis. I’m in full-time private practice offering online therapy to Hawaii and Florida residents. As a counseling psychologist, I’m called to help people heal, grow, and thrive with warm, positive, and empowering support. I provide a comfortable, safe, and confidential virtual space for clients to share their experiences at their own pace, explore what they want and need, and take next steps forward in feeling better and living a more peaceful, productive, and fulfilling life. My therapy approach is client-focused, solution-oriented, strength-based, and culturally and trauma-sensitive. And my treatment style is genuine and authentic to who I am as a person – open, compassionate, supportive, collaborative, empowering, and active.

What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?

During our first session or two, we’re getting to know each other and starting to feel comfortable working together. Our connection, the client and therapist rapport, is critical for your therapy experience to be successful. You should expect to feel safe to talk, feel, explore, and process at your pace what you are comfortable with. We’ll begin to learn more about what brings you to therapy, what you want out of therapy, what obstacles you encounter to achieving what you want, and what has already been helpful, even if only a little, in coping with your struggles. As we talk about what you want out of therapy, we’ll explore your goals in detail. This right away will create vision, provide direction, and instill hope and energy fueling your progress forward to feeling and doing better. Sharing the obstacles you encounter to achieving your goals will help also build our treatment plan. They will help us determine what tools or interventions we’ll use on your path forward to reducing or eliminating those obstacles. By the end of the first session or two, you should expect to see a clearer path forward to achieving your goals and already have new and renewed tools to start taking those next steps forward.

Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.

From a very young age, I was called a “counselor.” Being highly empathic, very open and non-judgmental, and passionate about helping others come very naturally to me. I’m also a “big picture,” “holistic” thinker, the idea that everything is connected. One of my favorite quotes is, “You know, out of context, I must seem so strange,“ by Ani DiFranco. So many factors influence who we are, how we think and feel, and what we do. To understand or accept another person‘s perspectives, it’s important to be open and non-judgmental. To make assumptions about something or someone we don't fully understand, and may never completely understand, is to do injustice and possibly harm.     Another favorite quote is, “Identify your problem, then give your energy and effort to the solutions," by Anon. While it can be very important and helpful to understand our past, I find it’s also important to not get lost in the problems and lose sight of what we want instead. This is something that we can easily find ourselves doing, as clients and therapists. Humans are well-wired to notice and be ready for the negative, sometimes not realizing we're overlooking the positive or even the reality, or what could help, or what could be different. So, while I help clients reflect on their lived experiences and explore their struggles and pain, I help create a balanced space for them to make greater progress more quickly and easily, unlike many other approaches to helping.  I also believe we’re resilient by nature. I’ve seen it often, personally and professionally, with disability and trauma. We’re able to adapt to huge change and heal from horrific experience in surprising ways, often resulting in unexpected growth and opportunities. Similar to what I mentioned above, to ignore this amazing ability we have would be a disservice in helping people heal, grow, and thrive.      These perspectives, which reflect who I am and how I live my life, have very much fueled my passion for helping and influenced how I help people, with a client-centered, solution-focused, strengths-based, open, non-judgmental, systemic (holistic), present and future oriented mindset.

About Mona Stribling

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