About Garlena
Garlena Rumsey is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) based in Idaho with 40 years of experience. She blends practical talk with body-focused awareness to help people who are stressed, anxious, grieving, or coping with trauma. Garlena uses straightforward language and calm presence to make sessions feel steady and predictable.
Her background includes long-term work with people facing depression, addiction, and trauma, and she has experience across many life stages and settings.
Background and approach
She draws on somatic work to help clients notice how stress shows up in the body. She also uses client-centered methods to shape sessions around each person’s needs. Garlena incorporates Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to identify unhelpful thoughts and to build practical coping steps.
She combines this with mindfulness and motivational interviewing when clients need tools for focus, change, or decision making. Sessions often include discussion, gentle attention to physical sensations, and simple skills to practice between meetings. Her approach is respectful and faith-informed; she identifies as Christian and describes being guided by faith while also working with people of other religions.
She emphasizes honesty, clear communication, and setting personal boundaries as part of healing and relationship work. People who choose her can expect a collaborative process that values both feelings and practical change. She offers multiple ways to connect and tailors her methods to match each person’s goals and life situation.
How somatic and practical approaches work online
Somatic-informed work helps people notice how stress or trauma appears in the body. It often uses breath, movement awareness, and tracking of sensations to reduce tension and increase present-moment control. This can be helpful for anxiety, trauma, chronic stress, and body-focused concerns.Client-Centered Therapy places the person’s experience at the center of sessions. The therapist listens without judgment and follows the client’s pace. This approach helps people feel heard and shapes options based on their priorities.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at the links between thoughts, feelings, and actions. It teaches simple, practical strategies to challenge unhelpful thoughts and build coping skills for daily life and relationships.
Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work. The therapist will collaboratively try methods that fit the client’s goals, needs, and comfort. If something does not feel useful, adjustments are made so the plan matches real life.
Online therapy offers flexibility and multiple ways to stay connected. Video calls allow face-to-face interaction for movement and somatic noticing, while phone sessions suit people who prefer voice only. Live chat and text-based messaging offer short, ongoing check-ins and brief coaching between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy schedules and to continue work from different locations.
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- LGBT
- Relationship issues
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Family conflicts
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Traumatic brain injury
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Visually impaired
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 40 years
- Licensed
- Idaho
- Languages
- English