About Alana
Alana Thompson is an AASW-accredited social worker with 18 years of clinical experience. She helps people who are feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, stress, depression, grief, career uncertainty or the challenges of living with ADHD. Her manner is warm and direct, and she focuses on practical steps people can take now to feel steadier and more able to cope.
Alana uses a mix of cognitive and emotional approaches to help people understand what's driving their distress.
Background and approach
She works collaboratively to set clear, realistic goals and to build routines that support everyday functioning. Sessions are focused on what matters to the client and on small changes that add up over time. Her background includes frontline work in child protection and family services and later roles in university counselling and academic research.
That mix of practice and research informs how she assesses risk, plans for safety and supports long-term recovery. She has also completed Mental Health First Aid training. Alana maintains a non-judgemental, compassionate space where people can talk about hard things and test new ways of managing them.
She pays attention to both feelings and behaviour so clients leave with clearer ideas and practical tools. Her aim is to strengthen resilience and improve day-to-day wellbeing. Before returning to full-time practice she worked managing a university counselling service, supporting students with welfare, coping strategies and referrals.
Her earlier research focused on making child protection systems less adversarial and more therapeutic. This combination of hands-on work and scholarship shapes how she supports clients now.
Therapeutic approaches for online care
Alana commonly uses cognitive-style techniques and emotional processing methods to help people manage symptoms and improve everyday functioning. Cognitive-style techniques focus on identifying unhelpful thought patterns and testing them with practical experiments to reduce anxiety and depressive thinking. Emotional processing work helps people name, tolerate and respond differently to strong feelings like grief, shame or anger.Finding the right approach is usually a collaborative process. The therapist will discuss goals and preferences in early sessions and adapt methods as needed. Clients and the therapist choose strategies together so the work feels relevant and achievable.
Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone sessions, live chat or text messaging to fit different routines. Video allows face-to-face conversation and visual cues, phone calls can suit lower bandwidth or hands-free times, chat works well for brief check-ins, and messaging supports ongoing reflection between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy around work, study and family life while maintaining continuity of care.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Grief
- Career difficulties
Also listed
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Antisocial personality
- Blended family issues
- Cancer
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Guilt and shame
- Immigration issues
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
- Experience
- 18 years
- Licensed
- Languages
- English
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