About Shawn
Shawn Mcgivern is a licensed mental health counselor with 27 years of clinical experience in Massachusetts. She focuses on helping people manage anxiety, depression, stress, relationship struggles, and phobias. Shawn aims to create a calm, affirming space where clients can start to feel more grounded and understood.
Her work emphasizes practical steps that fit into daily life. She helps people build better communication, handle grief and loss, and cope with trauma and recovery.
Background and approach
Shawn also supports those facing work-related stress, identity questions, perfectionism, procrastination, and eating or sleeping concerns. Shawn uses a collaborative style and adapts methods to match each person's needs. She draws on approaches like cognitive behavioral techniques and acceptance-based ideas to help people notice patterns and try new responses.
Skills-based tools are paired with attention to emotional experience so clients gain both insight and practical strategies. She also pays attention to attachment, intimacy, and how past relationships shape current reactions. That focus can help with abandonment worries, codependency, commitment doubts, and rebuilding trust after separation or loss.
Shawn supports people working through adoption and foster care issues, blended family stress, and caregiving burdens. Sessions aim to increase self-understanding and resilience. Shawn helps clients set realistic goals, practice new habits, and track small changes that add up.
The goal is clearer choices and more usable coping skills for everyday life.
Therapy approaches and online options that fit your life
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps people notice thoughts and feelings without getting stuck in them, then choose actions that match their values. It can be useful for anxiety, stress, avoidance, and stuck patterns. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on identifying unhelpful thought and behavior patterns and testing new ways of responding; it often helps with anxiety, depression, phobias, and sleep or eating concerns. Attachment-Based Therapy looks at how early relationships shape current reactions and helps people shift patterns that affect intimacy, trust, and communication.Finding the right approach is part of the work. Shawn collaborates with each client to pick methods that match their goals and preferences. Together they try strategies, track what helps, and adjust the plan based on progress and comfort level.
Online therapy is offered through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to make scheduling easier and to fit treatment into busy lives. Video sessions allow face-to-face conversation and skill practice, phone sessions can work when bandwidth is limited or a shorter check-in is needed, and messaging or chat can support quick reflections or ongoing tracking between meetings. These options make it easier to maintain steady work on goals despite a hectic schedule.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Immigration issues
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trichotillomania
- 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)
- Existential Therapy
- Gottman Method
- Imago Relationship Therapy
- Jungian Therapy
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Internal Family Systems
- Experience
- 27 years
- Licensed
- Massachusetts
- Languages
- English
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