Donna Altepeter, LCSW

Donna Altepeter is a licensed clinical social worker with 12 years of practice who focuses on helping people navigate stress, anxiety, grief, and life transitions. She works with individuals facing depression, compassion fatigue, addiction concerns, and struggles with self-esteem. Donna approaches each person with respect and curiosity and aims to partner on practical steps forward.

She uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as one of her main tools to help people spot unhelpful thoughts and test new behaviors. Her work also draws on client-centered principles, which keep the person’s experience at the center of sessions. Mindfulness and motivational interviewing techniques are used to build awareness and strengthen motivation to change.

Donna brings experience supporting people through serious illness, bereavement, caregiving stress, and end-of-life concerns. She also has experience with relationship and intimacy issues, parenting challenges, career stress, and mood disorders. That range helps her tailor sessions to the issue a person brings.

Her background includes years of teaching in a social work program, which shapes a collaborative teaching-and-learning style in session. Clients can expect straightforward conversation, practical skills to try between meetings, and space to make meaning of their experiences.

Donna provides sessions in English from Wisconsin. She offers video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging so people can choose what fits their schedule and needs.

How Donna’s Approaches Work Online

Donna often uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people identify thoughts and behaviors that keep problems in place, then try small experiments to change them. She also follows a client-centered approach, which means she listens closely and shapes the work around each person’s priorities and lived experience.

Finding the right approach is part of the work. Donna collaborates with each person to choose methods that fit their goals, preferences, and day-to-day life. That might mean combining CBT exercises with mindfulness practice or using motivational interviewing when someone is weighing a change. The plan changes as needs change, and she helps people track what works.

Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy easier to fit into busy lives. Video is useful for deeper conversation and skills practice, phone can be lower-bandwidth or simpler to schedule, and chat or messaging allow shorter check-ins or ongoing support between sessions. These options give flexibility so people can keep progress going from different places and routines.