About Valerie
Valerie Bryan is a Licensed Professional Counselor with 37 years in the mental health field. She brings a warm, human approach to sessions and often begins work aiming to help clients feel more hopeful in the first meeting. She practices in Texas and conducts therapy in English.
Valerie uses creative methods in session, drawing on her background as a registered art therapist. She may invite simple drawing or mapping exercises to help people name feelings, see patterns, or make decisions.
Background and approach
No art skill is required - the activities are tools to clarify what is happening in everyday life. Her style blends compassion and gentle humor with direct attention to painful material. Valerie draws on Jungian ideas and an appreciation of Native American spirituality to encourage balance, respect for differences, and gratitude.
She believes facing difficult feelings rather than denying them helps people move forward. Valerie works with a wide range of concerns including anxiety, depression, trauma and abuse, relationship struggles, grief, addictions, eating and intimacy-related issues. She also helps with parenting strain, caregiving stress, body image, codependency, and career transitions.
In sessions she may combine somatic awareness, attachment-based thinking, client-centered listening, cognitive-behavioral tools, and existential reflection. The focus is practical: reduce distress, improve coping, and increase connection to values and meaning. Her approach is collaborative and down-to-earth.
She encourages curiosity, small experiments, and steady steps toward greater self-knowledge and healthier patterns.
How Valerie’s approaches translate to online therapy
Somatic-informed work focuses on simple body awareness and noticing sensations connected to emotion. Online sessions can guide clients to track breath, posture, or tension and link those sensations to feelings and choices, which can help with anxiety, stress, and trauma-related reactions.Client-Centered Therapy emphasizes listening and acceptance. In video or phone sessions this means the therapist offers nonjudgmental attention and helps people name what matters to them, build self-compassion, and decide next steps grounded in their values.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) looks at thoughts, feelings, and actions and tests small changes to reduce distress. That approach adapts well to online work through conversational exercises, worksheets, and brief behavioral experiments clients try between sessions.
Finding the right mix of methods is part of the process. The therapist will collaborate with each person to see which approaches fit their goals, needs, and preferences. Together they will try ideas, notice what helps, and adjust the plan over time.
Online therapy offers practical flexibility: video calls for face-to-face conversation, phone sessions when video is not possible, and live chat or text messaging for brief check-ins and steady support. These options make it easier to keep continuity of care, fit sessions into a busy schedule, and use creative and somatic exercises in ways that suit each person's life.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 37 years
- Licensed
- Texas
- Languages
- English