Brenda Atkinson, LCSW, CSW

Brenda Atkinson is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 31 years of experience, bringing extensive practice helping people navigate mood disorders, anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, relationship and family challenges, and substance-related concerns. She works with individuals across life stages who are coping with early adulthood transitions, middle-age shifts, and later-life changes, offering focused support for parenting issues, blended families, career difficulties, and intimacy or commitment struggles.

Her clinical skill set includes work with addictions, LGBT concerns, bipolar disorder, compassion fatigue, and a range of trauma-related difficulties, as well as attention to complex patterns such as attachment and codependency. She also attends to less common but important areas like caregiver stress, antisocial and dependent personality features, dissociation, and disruptive mood presentations when indicated by a client’s needs.

Brenda integrates a broad array of therapeutic approaches to match each person’s goals, drawing on attachment-based and client-centered principles, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy, trauma-focused methods, emotionally focused and psychodynamic work, Jungian perspectives, existential and mindfulness-based strategies, motivational interviewing, solution-focused techniques, and Internal Family Systems. Her practice emphasizes the therapeutic relationship as central; she aims to be genuine and compassionate while offering structured interventions tailored to individual strengths and challenges.

She holds LCSW and CSW credentials, reflecting advanced licensure and professional preparation in social work. Based in Virginia, Brenda’s focus has long been on helping people grow emotionally and, when relevant, spiritually as they move through life’s transitions. Her approach balances sensitivity to personal experience with practical strategies for change.