Nora O'Connor, LCSW

Nora O'Connor is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in California with 15 years of experience. She blends practical therapies to help people manage stress, anxiety, addiction recovery, and LGBTQ+ concerns. Nora focuses on everyday problems like low self-esteem, career strain, and coping with big life changes. She primarily uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which looks at how thoughts and actions affect feelings. She also brings somatic awareness into sessions to help people notice how stress shows up in the body. These tools are used alongside trauma-informed practices when past events are part of the challenge. Nora works with people facing relationship strain connected to codependency, domestic violence, or non-monogamous arrangements, and she supports those dealing with caregiving stress, adoption and foster care issues, or isolation. She also addresses practical concerns such as money stress, career questions, and finding life purpose. Sessions are geared toward concrete skills and steady progress. Nora helps clients build coping strategies for panic, mood shifts, anger, and compassion fatigue. She offers a mix of short-term solution-focused work and deeper processing when needed. Her background includes running a somatic practice that informs how she notices bodily signals during therapy. People can expect clear steps, attention to both body and mind, and support tailored to their goals. Nora aims to help clients move toward greater self-love, forgiveness, and a more balanced daily life.

Therapeutic approaches in online sessions

CBT focuses on the links between thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. In online sessions this means identifying unhelpful thought patterns and practicing new behaviors or thinking skills together. It is often used for anxiety, stress, panic, and mood concerns. Somatic work pays attention to how stress and emotion appear in the body. In a session a client might be guided to notice breath, tension, or grounding sensations and then try gentle body-based techniques to reduce reactivity. This approach can help when past trauma or ongoing stress shows up physically. Finding the right mix of methods is a collaborative process. Nora will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what feels useful, and then shape a plan that may combine CBT, somatic awareness, or solution-focused tools. The plan can change as needs evolve. Online formats offer practical advantages. Video calls let therapists and clients work face to face when visual cues matter. Phone sessions can fit better when bandwidth is limited or a client prefers no video. Live chat and text-based messaging make it easier to check in between sessions or to have shorter, frequent check-ins when schedules are tight. Together these options make therapy more flexible and easier to fit into a busy life.