About Stephanie Gooding
I take your reasons seriously, including the ones you’re not proud of.
Choosing a therapist is a strange kind of decision. You’re deciding whether to trust someone you’ve never met with the things you’d least like to say out loud. So here is who I am.
I’m Stephanie Gooding, a licensed therapist, and I work with adults online. Most of the people who find me are dealing with trauma, anxiety, or relationship patterns they can’t seem to shake. They usually don’t need me to explain what’s happening to them. They want something to change, and they’d like more from therapy than learning to cope.
How I think about the work
Anxiety, a string of similar partners, a boundary that gives way the moment someone pushes, a voice that critiques every decision: these look like separate problems, and I rarely treat them that way. Usually they trace back to experiences from early on, when a particular reaction was the smartest option available.
The trouble is that reactions like that don’t expire. They follow you into adult relationships and work, where they no longer fit, and after enough years people stop seeing them as strategies and start calling them personality: I’m anxious. I’m too much. I’m needy. I’d rather get curious about where a reaction came from than argue with the label.
That doesn’t mean we’ll spend our time in the past for its own sake. The point is for what happened to stop steering what you do now.
I don’t draw hard lines between relationship issues, anxiety, and trauma. They’re often more connected than they first appear.
What working with me is like
I want therapy with me to feel like a place where you can give the accurate version of things, including the part you’ve edited out of every previous retelling and the reaction you’re not proud of. You should feel understood, respected, and safe enough to be that honest. I take that as my job.
I’m collaborative, which means your own read on your life counts for something. You’re not a puzzle I’m solving from a distance.
I’m also interested in what changes outside our sessions, not only what we talk about inside them: a hard conversation you handle differently, a no that doesn’t arrive with an hour of guilt, an evening when your mind quiets down a little sooner than it used to.
What I’m hoping to work toward with you is something quieter than any one of those: trusting your own judgment a bit more, and hearing the inner critic as one voice instead of the verdict. How you deal with other people can shift along with it.
Training and background
I hold an M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and an M.B.A. from Queens University’s McColl School of Business. My undergraduate degree is from Mount Holyoke College.
My clinical work draws on EMDR, Internal Family Systems, CBT, and the Gottman Method.
Where I practice
All of my sessions are online. My primary focus is New Jersey, and I also work with clients in North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and Florida. I provide therapy in English and Spanish.
You can also find me on Psychology Today.
- New JerseyLicensed Professional Counselor (LPC), No. 37PC01284900
- North CarolinaLicensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC), No. 12713
- GeorgiaLicensed Professional Counselor (LPC), No. 017108
- South CarolinaLicensed Professional Counselor (LPC), No. 2034283
- VirginiaLicensed Professional Counselor (LPC), No. 0701016426
- FloridaRegistered Telehealth Provider, No. TPMC7825