About Margaret
Margaret Swanson is a licensed clinical social worker with 25 years of experience helping people manage anxiety, depression, stress, phobias, and addiction. She works with individuals facing grief, parenting strain, career pressure, and life changes. Her style is calm and direct, and she aims to make therapy feel manageable for worried parents and busy adults.
Margaret uses a mix of practical tools and supportive listening. She teaches skills to handle overwhelming feelings and improve day-to-day functioning.
Background and approach
Sessions focus on small, doable steps so progress feels realistic. She draws on several well-known approaches, including acceptance and commitment strategies, cognitive behavior techniques, and attachment-based ideas. These methods are used to help people notice patterns, change unhelpful habits, and strengthen important relationships.
Her background includes long experience with trauma and abuse, compassion fatigue, and identity concerns such as LGBT issues. She also helps people facing chronic illness, caregiver stress, adoption and foster care questions, and other complex family topics. Margaret offers flexible ways to connect, including video, phone, chat, and text-based messaging.
She practices in Vermont as a VT and NH LICSW. People who want to start are asked to complete a short matching questionnaire and schedule a first session through the Start Therapy button. Her approach is collaborative and paced to each person's needs.
She focuses on steady, practical change rather than quick fixes, and she adjusts tools to fit each client's life and goals.
Therapeutic Approaches for Online Care
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps people clarify what matters to them and take committed steps toward those values, even when worry or fear gets in the way. It can be useful for anxiety, phobias, and coping with life changes. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing them with practical experiments and behavioral changes, which often helps with anxiety, depression, and stress. Attachment-Based Therapy looks at patterns in close relationships and works to change interaction styles that cause hurt and distance; this can help with relationship strain and attachment issues.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with each person to choose methods that fit their goals, needs, and daily life. She adapts techniques based on how someone responds and what feels most helpful over time.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging, which make it easier to fit therapy into busy schedules. Video helps with face-to-face conversation, phone can be simpler when bandwidth is limited, live chat and messaging allow for quick check-ins or written reflection between sessions. These options provide flexibility and let people use the format that best matches their routine and comfort.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Addictions
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating and food-related issues
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Impulsivity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- New Hampshire, Vermont
- Languages
- English
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