About Michele
Michele McShea brings 19 years of clinical practice as an LCSW to her work with people facing stress, anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, addictions, and a wide range of life challenges.
Background and approach
She frames healing as a process that blends insight with practical coping skills, helping clients build confidence and participate more fully in their lives. Michele emphasizes that lasting change often grows from both understanding personal patterns and developing concrete strategies to manage symptoms and reactions.
Her approach has supported clients dealing with trauma and abuse, grief, intimacy-related concerns, LGBT issues, family of origin matters, and struggles such as abandonment, codependency, body image, and guilt or shame. Michele also addresses concerns around infidelity, HIV/AIDS, isolation, and coping with major life transitions.
Working collaboratively, she aims to increase functioning while guiding people toward greater inner satisfaction and resilience. She accepts English-speaking and international clients and practices from Illinois as a licensed LCSW.
Therapeutic Approaches and Online Care
Michele draws from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Psychodynamic Therapy to tailor work to each person's needs. CBT focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and changing behaviors to reduce symptoms like anxiety or depression, and it often includes skill-building for coping with stress. Psychodynamic therapy explores how past relationships and internal patterns shape current feelings and behaviors, helping clients gain insight into repeated difficulties and relational dynamics.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Michele partners with clients to consider their goals, preferences, and the issues they bring, and together they choose methods and techniques that feel most helpful. She views therapy as a joint effort that blends understanding with practical change strategies.
Online therapy through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging offers flexibility for people balancing work, travel, or varied schedules. These formats make it easier to maintain regular sessions and apply therapeutic skills in daily life, while allowing licensed professionals to provide consistent support across distances.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- LGBT
- Relationship issues
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- Body image
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- HIV / AIDS
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 19 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English