Emily Kissner

Emily Kissner is a licensed clinical professional counselor (LCPC) based in Illinois with 12 years of experience. She blends talk therapy and creative methods to help people manage depression, anxiety, trauma, and patterns that get in the way of daily life.

Emily trained in art therapy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and uses art alongside psychotherapy tools. Sessions often include practical coping skills, ways to understand emotions, and experiments with creative expression to make thoughts and feelings easier to work with.

She frames her work through a feminist lens and affirms LGBTQA+ identities. Emily is also poly, kink, and sex work - aware, and brings that sensitivity to conversations about relationships, boundaries, and sexual expression.

Emily helps clients address a wide range of concerns such as self-esteem, career stress, caregiver strain, attachment and abandonment issues, and complex family dynamics. She also supports people managing chronic illness, co-morbid conditions, or the impacts of abuse and trauma.

Her approach is collaborative and down-to-earth. She focuses on what a person needs now, offering tools they can try between sessions. People who prefer a creative route into therapy will find practical options for exploring feelings and making change.

How creative methods and evidence-based care translate online

Emily uses evidence-based therapeutic techniques alongside art-informed methods. Evidence-based methods focus on identifying unhelpful patterns in thinking and behavior and teaching concrete tools to change them; these techniques help with anxiety, depression, and managing trauma symptoms. Art-informed work uses drawing, collage, or other creative tasks to help people access emotions and tell their story in a different way, useful when words feel stuck or overwhelming.

Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work. Emily collaborates with each person to figure out what fits their goals, needs, and comfort level. That might mean more talk-focused sessions at first, adding creative exercises later, or alternating between the two based on progress and preference.

The biography does not list specific online session formats, so confirm current options before booking. Online therapy can make it easier to fit sessions into a busy week, allow shorter check-ins when schedules demand, and remove travel time so more energy goes toward the work. Licensed professionals can adapt creative exercises for remote use, suggest simple materials people already have, and give step-by-step prompts to try between sessions.