Joy Close, LCSW

Joy Close is a licensed clinical social worker with 28 years of experience helping adults navigate stress, anxiety, grief, and trauma and abuse. She focuses on practical changes that make daily life easier and clearer. Joy aims to create a respectful, accepting place where people feel heard and understood before any work begins.

She uses a collaborative style that asks what matters most to each person. Sessions focus on building coping skills, clarifying values, and resolving problems that get in the way of feeling better. Joy adjusts her approach to fit each person rather than using a single method for everyone.

Her background includes long experience supporting people through depression, life transitions, relationship and family conflict, and sexual identity concerns. She also works with those facing chronic illness, caregiving stress, end-of-life concerns, and issues common to veterans and first responders. Joy brings an interest in multicultural and social justice issues into her work.

Therapeutic tools she draws on include mindfulness practices, acceptance and commitment ideas, client-centered listening, psychodynamic reflection, and solution-focused planning. These tools are blended to match a person’s goals and pace.

Joy describes herself as LGBTQIA+ affirming, anti-racist, anti-sexist, and sex positive. She works with adults from diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds to help them find clearer direction and better daily coping.

How Joy Uses Therapy Approaches Online

Joy integrates Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Mindfulness Therapy to help people focus on what matters and develop steady habits for handling stress. ACT helps people name their values and take small steps toward them even when difficult feelings are present. Mindfulness work builds simple practices to reduce reactivity and improve sleep, focus, and emotional regulation.

She also relies on Client-Centered Therapy, which centers on active listening and reflecting what a person is feeling. This approach is useful for people needing support with grief, identity questions, or relationship concerns because it prioritizes being understood first. The therapist will work with each person to decide which approaches fit their goals and preferences in a collaborative way.

For online work, confirm current session options before booking. Online therapy can make it easier to fit sessions into a busy week, allow for shorter check-ins when needed, and reduce travel time. Some approaches translate well to remote sessions - for example, mindfulness practice and values-based planning can be done in a live appointment - but the therapist will discuss which format best supports each person’s needs and schedule.