Shelly Foster

After 17 years in corporate America, Shelly Foster changed careers to follow a long-standing passion for clinical social work. She attended graduate school 19 years ago and earned a master’s degree in Clinical Social Work. She is licensed in Minnesota as an independent clinical social worker and brings 11 years of professional therapy experience.

Shelly has provided therapy to individuals, couples, and families, working with adolescents and adults who face mood disorders, anxiety, trauma and abuse, family conflict, attachment and relationship issues, and life transitions. Her clinical experience also includes crisis risk assessment, addressing suicidal thoughts, teaching coping skills, and offering psychoeducation.

Her work has spanned a variety of settings and communities, serving people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds in both urban and rural environments. This has included providing mental health services to homeless young adults in a large urban area, delivering in-home family counseling in a rural community, offering family and individual therapy in a suburban clinic, and assessing suicide risk in a hospital emergency department. Through these roles she has seen a consistent desire among people - regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, social status, gender identity, or sexual orientation - to live their best lives.

Shelly approaches therapy with the belief that each person is the expert on their own life. Her role is to come alongside clients to help them discover their answers and move toward their goals. She emphasizes careful, attentive listening and views therapy as a collaborative partnership that requires trust. Her aim is to create a safe, non-judgmental space where clients feel heard, understood, supported, and helped.

Therapy is customized to meet each person’s unique needs. Shelly is trained in and draws from multiple therapeutic models, including cognitive behavioral approaches, dialectical behavior methods, solution focused therapy, psychodynamic work, trauma focused techniques, and mindfulness practices. She believes that the quality of the therapeutic relationship is central to the effectiveness of any chosen approach.

In addition to formal training, Shelly brings life experience and a sense of humor to her work, viewing humor as a valuable resource. She has faced her own challenges and transitions, and often uses the metaphor of life as a raft on a river - sometimes the water is calm and sometimes there are rocks and rapids, but the goal is to stay on the raft no matter what lies around the next bend.

If Shelly sounds like the kind of counselor a person is seeking, she would welcome the opportunity to work together. If not, she hopes the individual finds the best fit to address their needs.