Alyson Gardner

I'm a licensed clinical social worker in Utah and I've been doing this work for close to ten years. I see adults across the state by video for anxiety, depression, and trauma.

Before I moved into general adult practice, I spent six years at a neurobehavioral center working with neurodivergent clients and their families. I ran assessments and support groups, worked with parents, and sat in on cases alongside psychologists and behavior analysts. That stretch changed how I see almost everything else. A lot of what gets labeled as anxiety in an adult turns out to be years of compensating for a brain that works differently, and nobody ever named it.

I hold a master's degree in social work and I'm trained in EMDR, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Cognitive Processing Therapy. Most of my clients are adults juggling more than they can comfortably carry: a job that's stopped working, a relationship that ended, a diagnosis that arrived late, or something old that still has a grip on them.

I want you to leave sessions with something you can use, so I ask questions, I offer what I'm noticing, and I'll tell you honestly when I think something is worth looking at.

For trauma I mainly use EMDR and Cognitive Processing Therapy. They work differently and I pick based on you. EMDR helps your brain reprocess a memory without needing you to narrate every detail out loud, which matters if talking about it has always felt impossible. CPT works on the beliefs an experience left behind, the ones that quietly run the show afterward. For anxiety and the general sense of being stretched too thin, I use CBT, acceptance and commitment work, and mindfulness skills you can actually practice between sessions.

I'll follow your pace. I'm not going to push you into the hard material before you're ready for it, and I'll say so if I think we're circling it.

Mostly questions, and no pressure to have your story organized before you arrive.

I'll ask what brought you in now rather than six months ago, what you've already tried, and what you'd want to be different if this goes well. If you've had therapy before that didn't help, I want to hear about that too, since it usually tells me a lot about what to do differently.

By the end we'll have a rough sense of where to start. You won't get a treatment plan handed to you in the first hour, but you should leave knowing what we're working on and why.