About Denise
Denise McNicholas is an Illinois-licensed counselor (LCPC) who brings five years of clinical experience to work with people facing relationship challenges, self-esteem and confidence concerns, career transitions, and coaching needs.
Background and approach
She draws on a strengths-based perspective, inviting clients to recognize their own expertise about their lives while offering structured guidance to address motivation and goal-setting. Her practice also attends to issues such as chronic pain, illness and disability, forgiveness, life purpose, self-love, traumatic brain injury, and women's issues.
Denise emphasizes collaboration and practical skills, blending evidence-informed techniques to help clients move toward clearer priorities and everyday coping strategies. She frames the first step into therapy as an act of courage and supports clients through the early stages of engagement and planning.
Her approach aims to balance acknowledgment of each person’s challenges with actionable steps for change, whether through focused coaching or therapeutic interventions tailored to personal goals.
Evidence-Based Approaches for Online Counseling and Coaching
Denise regularly uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to help clients identify and shift unhelpful thinking patterns and to develop practical strategies for changing behavior; this approach often helps with confidence, motivation, and managing career-related stress. She also draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which encourages mindful awareness of thoughts and feelings alongside moving toward personally meaningful values and goals, useful for life purpose and self-love work. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills may be incorporated to teach emotion regulation and distress tolerance when those tools fit a client’s needs.Finding the right approach is treated as a collaborative process. Denise works with clients to explore which methods align with their goals and preferences, and she adjusts plans over time based on how clients respond and what they find most helpful.
Online therapy options include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging, providing flexibility for different schedules and comfort levels. These formats make it possible to maintain consistent progress while accommodating work commitments, mobility concerns, or geographic constraints, and they support ongoing coaching as well as short-term therapeutic work.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Career difficulties
Also works with
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Forgiveness
- Life purpose
- Self-love
- Traumatic brain injury
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 5 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English