About Ruth
Ruth Anthony-McClary is a licensed clinical social worker in New Jersey with 30 years of experience. She focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety, mood concerns, and the fallout from trauma and abuse. Ruth aims to create a calm, respectful space where people can talk about what matters to them.
She uses straightforward, practical methods to build coping skills and boost self-esteem. Conversations and any plan are shaped around each person’s needs, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Background and approach
That includes work on relationships, grief, intimacy concerns, parenting stress, and life changes. Ruth draws on approaches that center the relationship between the therapist and the client. She includes techniques from cognitive behavioral work and mindfulness to help people shift unhelpful thoughts and increase present-moment awareness.
Motivational strategies are used when clients want support making concrete changes in work, caregiving, or daily routines. Many people come for help with anger, career stress, bipolar mood management, or compassion fatigue from caregiving roles. She also addresses issues tied to adoption and foster care, attachment concerns, chronic illness, body image, and communication problems.
Ruth adapts sessions to fit individual goals and life demands. Her style is warm and direct. She emphasizes clear goals, steady progress, and practical tools that can be used between sessions.
Ruth supports each person at their own pace and helps them build skills for longer-term change.
Approaches that translate well to online care
Ruth uses attachment-based ideas to look at how early and current relationships shape reactions and expectations. This work helps people understand patterns in close relationships and reduce intensity around intimacy-related issues. She also draws on client-centered therapy, which centers on listening, empathy, and shaping sessions around what the person finds most important. That approach supports people who want a respectful, paced conversation about their goals. Cognitive behavioral techniques are used to identify and change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors, which can be practiced as homework between sessions and reviewed online.Finding the right approach is part of the work. Ruth will collaborate with each person to decide which methods match their needs, goals, and preferences. She adjusts techniques over time so sessions remain useful and goal-oriented.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video sessions allow face-to-face interaction and visual cues. Phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited or when someone prefers not to be on camera. Live chat and text messaging suit short check-ins, thought tracking, or coaching-style exchanges between longer sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy lives and keep continuity when schedules change.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Also listed
- Abandonment
- 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
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating and food-related issues
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Hoarding
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual dysfunction
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 30 years
- Licensed
- New Jersey
- Languages
- English
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