Sharon (Shonnie) Brown, LMFT

Sharon (Shonnie) Brown is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with 30 years of experience supporting people through stress, anxiety, relationship struggles, grief, parenting challenges, and life transitions. She helps clients who are coping with depression, anger, intimacy concerns, ADHD, and workplace strain. Her style is straightforward and compassionate and she often uses practical tools during sessions.

Shonnie draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), attachment-based ideas, dialectical behavior approaches, client-centered listening, and existential perspectives. She blends goal-setting, coping skills, mindfulness practices, and writing exercises when they fit a person’s needs. Sessions are collaborative and focused on what will help right now.

Her background includes a B.A. from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree in counseling psychology from John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California. Over the years she has led groups on separation and divorce, infidelity, co-parenting education, and social anxiety. She also brings experience working with life stage issues like aging and young adulthood.

Shonnie often addresses patterns that make emotional self-soothing hard, such as low self-compassion, codependency, and attachment wounds. She uses writing as a tool for emotional processing and sometimes integrates exercises from contemporary trauma work on complex childhood trauma.

Clients can expect direct, heart-centered conversations that focus on small, manageable steps. She encourages building skills for self-protection, self-love, and practical coping so people can move forward at their own pace.

How therapy approaches translate online

Shonnie uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people identify unhelpful thoughts and experiment with practical behavior changes that reduce anxiety, improve sleep, and ease low mood. Attachment-Based Therapy is used to look at relationship patterns and early woundings so clients can build healthier ways of relating and greater self-compassion. These methods focus on clear exercises and used together can address issues like codependency, intimacy problems, and chronic shame.

Choosing the right approach is part of the work. She collaborates with clients to decide which methods fit their goals, needs, and comfort level. That means trying an approach and adjusting it over time rather than committing to one path from the start.

Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life. Video works well for deeper conversations and exercises, phone can be useful when bandwidth is limited, and chat or messaging supports shorter check-ins or writing-based work. These options give flexible ways to practice skills, review coping tools, and stay connected between appointments.