About Shelly
Shelly Flachs is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) based in Illinois who uses practical, evidence-informed methods to help people make steady progress. She focuses on clear goals and short-term tools to reduce distress. Her style is direct and compassionate, aimed at helping people feel more capable day to day.
Shelly draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy to teach skills for managing strong emotions and unhelpful thoughts.
Background and approach
She also uses Emotionally-Focused Therapy and mindfulness techniques to help people connect with feelings and respond differently in relationships. Sessions are collaborative and paced to each person's needs. Her work addresses a wide range of concerns, including stress, anxiety, depression, grief, trauma and abuse, bipolar disorder, and addictions.
Shelly also helps people with relationship and intimacy issues, self-esteem, eating and sleeping problems, parenting strain, and career or life transitions. Phobias are one of the specific areas she lists among her focuses. Additional areas she attends to include ADHD, compassion fatigue, chronic illness and pain, codependency, attachment and abandonment issues, body image, and caregiver stress.
She tailors strategies to the problem at hand, combining skill training with supportive, reality-based talk. With twelve years of experience, Shelly brings practical tools and calm presence to sessions. She describes therapy as a partnership where goals are set together and progress is reviewed often.
People can expect straightforward plans, practice assignments, and steady support between sessions.
How specific approaches translate to online care
CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing them with real-life experiments. It helps with anxiety, depression, phobias, and problems that respond to structured skill practice. DBT, or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, teaches emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness skills to reduce intense reactions and improve relationships. Emotionally-Focused Therapy supports people in naming and processing core emotions and changing patterns in close relationships to improve connection and understanding.Finding the right approach is part of the process. The therapist will work collaboratively to match methods to your goals, needs, and personal preferences. That may mean starting with skills from CBT or DBT, then shifting to emotionally focused work as needed. Goals and progress are reviewed together so the plan can change when something isn’t working.
Online sessions offer flexibility for how and when you connect. Video calls let you use visual cues for deep conversations and skill practice. Phone sessions can be a good fit when bandwidth is limited or you need a simpler check-in. Live chat and text-based messaging allow brief updates, coaching between sessions, and written reflections that can be revisited later. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent around work, caregiving, or travel.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- 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
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 12 years
- Licensed
- Illinois, Maine, Missouri, Iowa
- Languages
- English
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