About Rita
Rita Kanareff is a licensed professional clinical counselor who helps people facing stress, anxiety, grief, and other heavy emotions. She writes short, clear guidance and listens for what matters most. Rita aims to make sessions feel practical and centered on the client's day-to-day life.
Rita brings 21 years of counseling experience in Ohio. She uses an approach that blends body-focused work with talk therapy. That means paying attention to physical sensations as well as thoughts and feelings during sessions.
Background and approach
Many clients come with trauma, relationship strain, or trouble sleeping and eating. Rita draws from cognitive behavioral tools and mindfulness to teach coping skills. She also uses somatic methods and EMDR-informed strategies to help people process painful memories and reduce their hold on daily life.
Sessions are conversational and skills-focused. Clients learn breathing and grounding practices, ways to shift unhelpful thinking, and steps to change small behaviors that make a big difference. Rita explains techniques clearly and adapts them to what each person finds useful.
Her work also addresses identity, intimacy-related concerns, parenting strain, career stress, and chronic pain or illness issues. Rita aims to help people build steadier coping, clearer boundaries, and more satisfying daily routines. She supports clients through transitions and toward more manageable, meaningful days.
How somatic work and skills translate to online care
Somatic-informed work pays attention to body sensations and how they link to thoughts and emotions; it uses breathing, grounding, movement awareness, and attention to physical signals to help reduce distress and increase calm. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and actions and teaches simple exercises to shift unhelpful thinking and change day-to-day habits. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) brings concrete skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and improving interpersonal effectiveness, useful for strong emotions and relationship strain.Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work. The therapist collaborates with each person to decide which methods feel most helpful, adapting somatic practices and skills training to individual goals and preferences. This means trying things, checking what helps, and changing course when needed.
Online sessions allow for flexible access to these approaches through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. Video lets the therapist and client practice breathing and grounding together, while phone or text options offer more discreet ways to stay connected. The range of formats makes it easier to fit therapy into busy lives and to use techniques in real time when stress arises.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also works with
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Fatherhood issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- HIV / AIDS
- Impulsivity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 21 years
- Licensed
- Ohio
- Languages
- English