About Wendy
Wendy Gilchrist is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor with 20 years of experience. She brings a background in nonprofit leadership and community work into her counseling practice. Wendy blends life experience with clinical skills to help people facing anxiety, depression, grief, and the strain of parenting or family conflict.
Wendy talks plainly and listens closely. Sessions focus on practical steps people can try between meetings. She uses approaches like client-centered work, cognitive behavioral techniques, mindfulness, and narrative methods to help people notice patterns and make changes.
Background and approach
Her earlier career built programs for homeless youth and survivors of abuse, and she later moved into clinical roles in hospital psychiatric units and trauma-informed services. That mix of grassroots organizing and hospital work shapes how she understands stress, chronic illness, and complicated life changes. Wendy often helps people dealing with relationship struggles, anger, low self-esteem, career stress, and compassion fatigue.
She also supports clients navigating bipolar disorder, ADHD, chronic pain or illness, and bereavement. Her practice addresses family of origin issues, abandonment, codependency, and similar concerns. She offers sessions in English and Spanish and makes herself available to people in Illinois as well as international clients.
Communication options include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging so people can choose what works best for their schedule and needs.
How Wendy’s approaches translate to online care
Client-centered work focuses on the person’s own goals and strengths, with the therapist following the client’s lead and offering empathy and reflection to build trust and clarity. It helps people who need a calm space to make sense of what they are feeling.Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) gives clear tools for noticing unhelpful thoughts and testing them with small experiments. It is useful for anxiety, low mood, phobias, and stress because it breaks problems into manageable steps people can practice between sessions.
Mindfulness therapy teaches simple attention and breathing practices that reduce reactivity and improve focus. These techniques often help with chronic stress, anger, and coping with persistent physical illness or pain.
Finding the right approach is part of the work. Wendy will talk with each person about their goals, history, and preferences, then try methods that fit. This is a collaborative process, and approaches can be adjusted as needs change.
Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to make counseling more flexible. Video lets people use visual cues and deeper conversation, phone can be a quicker check-in with less bandwidth, and chat or messaging fits brief updates or people who prefer not to be on camera. These options allow scheduling that fits work, caregiving, or travel constraints and help maintain continuity of care when life is busy.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Parenting issues
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Grief
- Impulsivity
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Paranoia
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Somatization
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English, Spanish
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