Paula Knighton, LPC

Paula Knighton is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in Virginia with 25 years of clinical experience. She focuses on helping people manage stress and anxiety, address addictions, and work through trauma and abuse. Paula also supports clients who want help with motivation, self-esteem, relationships, grief, and life changes.

Paula aims to make the therapy room feel open and nonjudgmental. She listens carefully and works at the clients pace. She uses practical conversations to help people identify patterns that get in the way and to try small, doable changes.

Her background includes long-term work with mood and behavior concerns. Paula draws on approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Motivational Interviewing to help people find clearer values, manage difficult thoughts, and build better coping skills. She also uses client-centered and emotionally-focused ideas when relationship or attachment issues come up.

Sessions are framed around real-life goals, like improving sleep, reducing substance use, managing anger, or coping with illness and aging. Paula pays attention to how life stress, caregiving, career demands, and exhaustion affect daily choices. She helps people break problems into manageable steps and track small gains.

Her stated availability is weekdays and Saturday morning. If a session starts more than 15 minutes late, clients are asked to reschedule. To begin, clients follow the site's Start Therapy process to match and schedule according to availability.

How Paula's approaches translate to online work

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps people clarify what matters to them and take small steps toward those values while learning to live with difficult thoughts and feelings. It can help when someone is stuck, coping with addiction, or facing big life changes. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on the link between thoughts, feelings, and actions and uses practical strategies to change unhelpful patterns. CBT can be useful for anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and mood management. Motivational Interviewing is a short-term, goal-focused way of talking that helps people find their own reasons to change and build motivation for steps like reducing substance use.

Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will work with each person to pick and adapt methods based on needs, goals, and preferences. Clients and the therapist check in about what is helping and adjust the plan together.

Confirm current session formats before booking since the profile does not list specific online options. Online therapy can make it easier to fit sessions into a busy week, shorten commute time, and allow for check-ins from work or home when schedules permit. It can also let people focus on short skills practice without needing to be on camera for every appointment. Ask about available times and formats when you complete the matching questionnaire.