About Susan
Susan Zapatha helps people facing relationship struggles, family conflict, trauma, grief, and everyday stress. She is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in Florida with many years of practice. Her approach aims to make it easier to talk about hard things.
She focuses on building a respectful, nonjudgmental space for honest conversation. Clients often bring worries about anxiety, depression, addiction, sleep problems, anger, or self-esteem. Susan also supports people dealing with parenting strain, career questions, intimacy concerns, and major life changes.
Background and approach
She works with issues connected to attachment, abandonment, adoption and foster care, and neurodiversity such as autism and Asperger Syndrome. Susan combines practical strategies with attention to emotions and relationships. She uses client-centered methods to follow what matters most to each person.
Cognitive behavioral techniques help break down unhelpful patterns and try new behaviors. She also draws on attachment-focused and emotionally-focused ideas to look at connection, closeness, and how early bonds shape current relationships. Sessions are collaborative and paced to each person's comfort level.
Susan aims to help people notice small shifts that add up to meaningful change. With nearly three decades of experience, Susan keeps her work straightforward and warm. She encourages realistic goals and offers coaching-style support when helpful.
Her practice is based in Florida and she conducts sessions in English.
How Susan’s approaches work online
Susan uses client-centered therapy to focus sessions around the person’s priorities and current concerns. This approach emphasizes listening, empathy, and helping people find their own solutions, which can be effective for stress, grief, and relationship issues.She also incorporates Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to identify thought and behavior patterns that keep problems going. CBT offers practical exercises and small experiments that translate well to online formats and can help with anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and coping skills.
Choosing the right approach is a shared process. Susan will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what has or hasn’t worked before. Together they decide whether to try emotion-focused work, attachment ideas, CBT techniques, or a mix of methods based on what feels most helpful.
Online therapy offers several practical benefits. Video calls let people keep a face-to-face rhythm while staying in their own location. Phone sessions require less bandwidth and can work well when movement or hands-free time is needed. Live chat and text-based messaging make it easier to check in between sessions, record thoughts in the moment, or fit brief check-ins into a busy day. These options make scheduling more flexible and help therapy fit into real life routines.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- 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
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Stress, Anxiety
- Traumatic brain injury
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 28 years
- Licensed
- Florida
- Languages
- English