About Donna
Donna Handy is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who focuses on adults facing medical trauma, chronic illness, and major life changes. She understands how a diagnosis, hospitalization, or transplant can upend daily life and bring intense emotions. Donna aims to create a calm, steady space where people can process what happened and begin to move forward.
She draws on her personal experience as a two-time transplant survivor to shape empathetic care.
Background and approach
Sessions emphasize practical coping skills and ways to rebuild confidence after health setbacks. When it feels useful, Donna can welcome conversations about Christian faith and fold those values into the work. Donna earned a master’s degree in Clinical Rehabilitation and Mental Health Counseling, which included training in adjustment to medical conditions and disabilities.
She combines that background with tools from evidence-based therapeutic techniques to address anxiety, grief, and trauma related to health events. In sessions she helps people identify strengths, manage symptoms like panic or overwhelming worry, and create plans for daily life that reduce strain.
She also supports those dealing with caregiver stress, chronic pain, body image concerns, and questions about life purpose after a major event. Therapy with Donna is collaborative and goal-focused. She works with each person to find realistic next steps, building coping skills and resilience over time.
The aim is steady progress toward more confidence and hope.
How evidence-based approaches work online
Donna uses evidence-based therapeutic techniques that fit people coping with medical trauma and major health events. Cognitive behavioral techniques focus on spotting and changing unhelpful thinking and behavior patterns to reduce anxiety and panic symptoms. Motivational interviewing helps people find their own reasons for change and build motivation around goals like managing treatment routines or self-care. EMDR-informed interventions are used to process traumatic memories and lessen their emotional hold, when that approach feels appropriate.Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. Donna discusses options with each person, considers goals and comfort, and adjusts methods over time. The plan evolves based on what helps most in real life, and the therapist and client decide together which strategies to try.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy more flexible. Video is useful for in-depth conversations and seeing facial cues, phone can work when bandwidth is limited, live chat suits shorter check-ins, and messaging lets people reflect between sessions. These options help fit therapy into busy or changing schedules and make it easier to connect from different locations.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Trauma and abuse
- Grief
- Career difficulties
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Attachment issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Family of origin issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Life purpose
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Self-love
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Experience
- 4 years
- Licensed
- Rhode Island
- Languages
- English