About Alanna
Alanna Higgins is a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) based in Pennsylvania with a decade of practice. She focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety, low self-esteem, career struggles, and depression. Alanna emphasizes the client’s own strengths and respects each person as the expert in their life story.
She takes a straightforward, down-to-earth approach in sessions. Conversations are practical and goal-oriented. She helps clients break problems into manageable steps and build skills that fit daily life.
Background and approach
Alanna blends several clinical methods to suit different needs. She uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to spot and change unhelpful thinking patterns. Mindfulness strategies help with calm, focus, and emotional regulation.
For people with trauma-related symptoms, she may use EMDR techniques as part of a paced plan. Her work also addresses less-often-discussed struggles like compassion fatigue, caregiver stress, adoption and foster care challenges, hoarding, and obsessive-compulsive patterns. She listens for how these issues affect work, relationships, and daily routines, then helps people make concrete adjustments.
Sessions are collaborative: she checks in on goals and adapts the plan as progress unfolds. Alanna encourages small, consistent changes and honors the courage it takes to start therapy. She offers services in English from her Pennsylvania practice.
Over ten years of experience inform a calm, problem-solving style that aims to make therapy clear and usable. People seeking steady, practical support for anxiety, depression, life transitions, or career concerns may find this approach helpful.
How Alanna’s Approaches Work Online
Alanna commonly uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness Therapy in online sessions. CBT focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing them with practical experiments, which can reduce anxiety and improve mood. Mindfulness Therapy teaches simple attention and breathing practices to help people manage stress and stay present.She also incorporates elements of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing for clients with trauma-related symptoms, using paced steps to reduce distress and build tolerance to difficult memories. Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process - the therapist will discuss goals, try methods, and adjust the plan based on what helps most.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video works well for longer sessions and face-to-face conversation. Phone sessions can be lower bandwidth and easier to fit into a busy schedule. Live chat or text messages suit quick check-ins, brief skill coaching, or ongoing support between longer sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into daily life while using the clinical tools that best match each person's needs.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Self esteem
- Career difficulties
Also listed
- Adoption and foster care
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Commitment issues
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Depression
- Emptiness
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed
- Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware
- Languages
- English
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