About Michael
Michael Leffingwell is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Texas with 13 years of clinical experience. He focuses on stress, anxiety, trauma and abuse, grief, self-esteem, and help with life changes. He presents a calm, respectful approach and aims to make conversations straightforward and useful.
He uses a mix of attachment-based work and cognitive behavioral techniques to help people understand patterns that cause pain. Sessions are shaped around each person's needs, so goals and exercises will look different from one person to the next.
Background and approach
Michael listens for what matters most and then offers practical steps to try between meetings. Clients often come with relationship hurts, abandonment concerns, or struggles stemming from family of origin issues. He also supports people facing chronic pain, caregiver stress, addiction concerns, eating-related issues, fertility stress, and first responder strains.
Conversations attend both feelings and day-to-day decisions so coping feels more manageable. Michael values plain language and concrete tools over jargon. He will work with a client to set clear short-term goals and track progress in simple ways.
That can include skill practice, small behavioral experiments, or body-focused exercises to reduce tension. Starting therapy is presented as a step-by-step process. Michael encourages honest, gradual work and adjusts his approach as needs shift.
The aim is to help people feel more steady and more able to handle what comes next.
Therapeutic approaches that translate online
Attachment-based work focuses on how early relationships shape current trust and closeness. Online sessions can help identify patterns in relationships and practice new ways of connecting and setting boundaries.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, breaks problems into thoughts, feelings, and actions. In remote sessions this often looks like identifying unhelpful thinking, testing small behavior changes, and using worksheets or brief experiments between meetings to build new habits.
Finding the right approach is part of the process and will be collaborative. The therapist will talk with the client about goals, preferences, and what feels most helpful, and then adjust methods as progress is made. That way the plan stays practical and aligned with real-life needs.
Online therapy offers flexibility through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. Video is useful for deeper conversational work and body-based observation, phone calls can fit a shorter break or lower bandwidth, live chat can support quick check-ins, and messaging lets people share updates when it suits them. These options make it easier to keep momentum and use therapy around daily life commitments.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Attachment issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- HIV / AIDS
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Traumatic brain injury
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 13 years
- Licensed
- Texas
- Languages
- English
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