Joni De GrootLMFT

Joni De Groot is a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) with 35 years of practice in California. She helps people struggling with stress, anxiety, relationship and parenting concerns, and offers coaching to support clearer goals and next steps. Her manner is down-to-earth and focused on practical change. Joni uses a collaborative, client-centered style that invites people to name what matters most to them. She blends cognitive behavioral techniques with mindfulness and a Jungian outlook to help people spot unhelpful patterns. Sessions emphasize skills that can be used between appointments to ease daily stress and improve communication. Her background includes work as an intake coordinator, case manager, and therapist in sub-acute care, outpatient clinics, schools, and residential settings. She has worked on multi-disciplinary teams alongside psychiatrists and social service agencies, giving her experience across a wide range of situations. Joni describes her approach as practical and holistic. She often focuses on building coping skills for anxiety, addressing family or parenting questions, and helping people manage the fallout from separation or loss. She also addresses issues such as attachment, body image, codependency, and caregiver stress when they relate to a person's everyday functioning. She is comfortable with tele-therapy and aims to create a nonjudgmental space where people can make decisions that suit their lives. To begin, a simple intake and collaborative planning process helps shape goals and next steps.

Therapeutic approaches for online care

Client-centered therapy emphasizes listening closely to each person's priorities and building goals together. It helps when someone wants a respectful, collaborative space to make choices and try new ways of coping. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing small behavior changes. It is often used for stress, anxiety, and everyday problems that respond to practical skill-building. Dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, offers concrete skills for managing intense emotions and improving communication. It is useful when people need tools for regulation, relationship interactions, or reducing reactive behaviors. Choosing an approach is a shared process. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, current challenges, and personal preferences, then recommend strategies to try. Together they check what helps and adjust the plan as therapy progresses. Online work can make therapy easier to fit into a busy life. It can reduce travel time, allow shorter check-ins between in-person commitments, and help people connect when juggling childcare or work. Because session formats were not specified in the biography, confirm current session options before booking so you know what is available and can choose what fits your routine best.