Susan Garner, LMFT

Susan Garner is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with 20 years of clinical practice. As an LMFT she is trained to work with individuals, couples, and families, combining professional training with life experience to support lasting change. She has worked with people from about 17 to over 70 years of age, including same-sex couples and clients from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and brings a steady commitment to each person’s healing and personal growth.

Susan helps clients and families define clear objectives and practical goals, acknowledging that the issues people bring to therapy are often complex and interwoven. She approaches problems by looking for their core emotional or psychological origins - such as traumatic events or family-of-origin dynamics - and then helps clients develop new skills and patterns to improve relationships, functioning, and well-being. The first step she emphasizes is identifying the problem clearly so that meaningful change can follow.

Susan describes talking and reflective work as a way to feel less isolated in the moment and to build longer-term clarity, confidence, and self-esteem. She recognizes that successful therapy depends both on a client's view of the therapist’s skill and on the therapeutic alliance, and she offers respect, compassion, and acceptance as the foundation of her work. Her approach blends multiple traditions - attachment-based and client-centered perspectives, cognitive behavioral techniques, emotionally-focused work, mindfulness and somatic methods, psychodynamic insight, trauma-focused strategies, and Internal Family Systems - so that treatment is tailored to each person's needs. She has experience addressing relationship and marital challenges, self-esteem and communication issues, healthy boundaries, mood and anxiety concerns, co-dependency, unresolved trauma, life transitions including loss and divorce, and the dynamics of blended families.