Tamela Polanin, LCPC

Tamela Polanin is an Illinois Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) with 20 years of experience in mental health. She helps adults who are managing stress, anxiety, depression, relationship and family concerns, trauma and abuse, anger, parenting strain, grief, and other life changes. Sessions are framed around practical goals and steady support.

Tamela uses a client-centered stance that puts the person’s priorities first. She also draws on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Emotionally-Focused Therapy, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing to address painful memories, intense emotions, and repeated behavior patterns. Her approach focuses on learning skills, noticing patterns, and practicing new responses between sessions.

Clients can expect straightforward conversations about what is happening and why it keeps happening. Tamela talks through coping tools, communication strategies, and steps for managing strong feelings like anger and frustration. She often blends skill practice with deeper work on past experiences that continue to shape present reactions.

Her background includes long-term clinical work in community settings and trauma-focused interventions. Tamela identifies personal experience with trauma, and that perspective informs how she approaches treatment for trauma and reproductive loss. She also mentions work with trauma-focused therapies such as EMDR.

Outside of practice she lives in rural Illinois with her family and raises registered pygmy goats. That personal detail is part of how she describes herself but does not change the way she structures sessions or goals.

How Tamela applies CBT, DBT and EMDR online