Sheri Bell-O'Gara, LCSW

Sheri Bell-O'Gara is a licensed clinical social worker with 29 years of experience. She focuses on trauma, anxiety, depression, grief, and challenges that come with illness and caregiving. Sheri brings a straightforward, compassionate style and uses humor when it helps clients cope.

She favors an approach that follows the client rather than forcing a single method. Sessions often combine talk, practical skills, and focused therapies to relieve symptoms and improve daily functioning. Sheri has worked with hospice clients, geriatric populations, and returning combat veterans from recent conflicts.

Sheri draws on several clinical approaches to match the work to each person’s needs. She uses cognitive behavioral tools for changing unhelpful thinking and sleep routines, acceptance-based strategies to help people live around difficult feelings, and trauma-focused methods when past events continue to cause distress. She is also training in somatic therapy.

Her practice includes issues like chronic pain, caregiver stress, compassion fatigue, and life transitions. She helps people handle relationship tensions, parenting stress, anger, and questions of life purpose. Sheri pays attention to the whole picture, including family of origin patterns and the effects of isolation or loss.

Sessions are offered in English and Sheri accepts international clients. She encourages a collaborative process that respects each person’s pace. The first step is a short matching questionnaire to get started.

How Sheri's Approaches Work Online

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people notice difficult thoughts and feelings without getting stuck by them, then take steps toward what matters. It can be useful for anxiety, depression, and coping with chronic health issues. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on identifying and changing unhelpful thoughts and behaviors; it often includes practical exercises for sleep, mood, and daily routines. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing is a trauma-focused method that addresses disturbing memories and the reactions they cause, and it can reduce the grip of past events on current life.

Finding the right approach is part of therapy. The therapist works collaboratively to figure out what fits a person’s goals, needs, and comfort level. Clients and therapist decide together whether to emphasize acceptance work, skill-based CBT, or trauma-focused processing, and that plan can change over time.

Confirm the exact online session formats before booking. Sheri's biography notes video, chat, texting, and phone as options, so check which of those are currently offered. Online sessions can make it easier to fit appointments into busy schedules, shorten check-ins on tough days, or let people choose a session style that needs less bandwidth or no camera. These practical benefits help therapy fit into everyday life without promising a particular outcome.