Dawn Ascanio
Therapist + Therapeutic Coach
Meet Dawn
Feel deeply understood and make lasting changes with practical, compassionate guidance.
I’m Dawn, a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and Therapeutic Coach with 19 years of experience helping adults feel understood, make sense of what they’re experiencing, and learn how to do things differently.
I offer online/telehealth therapy in Maine and I specialize in trauma and PTSD, self-doubt and low self-esteem, people-pleasing, and perfectionism. My approach is practical, compassionate, and grounded in evidence-based therapy, with plenty of tools, strategies, and skills you can use in your everyday life.
What You Can Expect
When You Work With Me
Compassionate directness
I’m direct and willing to have hard conversations. If I notice a pattern or behavior that seems to be getting in your way, I’ll let you know, always with compassion, curiosity, and an understanding of why that pattern developed in the first place.
Practical tools, strategies, and skills
I like to give you practical, concrete ways to handle the things you’re struggling with. That includes tools for responding to your thoughts and emotions more effectively, changing patterns that make life harder, and trying new ways of doing things in your everyday life. You’ll likely learn something you haven’t tried before, or learn a different way to use something you’ve tried in the past.
Focus
I see it as my job to help keep our work focused on what brought you to therapy or coaching in the first place. Life will continue to happen while we’re working together, and sometimes what happened during your week needs our attention. But I’ll also help us come back to the larger patterns and goals you most want to change.
Depth
People tend to feel comfortable opening up with me fairly quickly. I listen deeply for the patterns and underlying issues that seem most important, and I ask substantive questions from the beginning so we can focus on what really matters. We’ll bring in your history and background as it becomes relevant to what we’re working on. That helps us make connections, understand what’s underneath the patterns you’re struggling with, and stay focused on the changes you want to make.
Why I Do This Work
I’ve chosen these specialties very intentionally. Self-doubt, low self-esteem, people-pleasing, and perfectionism are areas I’ve worked with for many years, both professionally and in my own life. I’ve developed programs and resources around these patterns, worked with many clients to change them, and done a great deal of this work myself.
Trauma and PTSD have become a more intentional focus of my practice in recent years. Training in Written Exposure Therapy gave me a structured, focused, evidence-based way to help people work directly with traumatic experiences and reduce the impact those experiences are still having on their lives. It fit so well with the way I already work that I knew I wanted trauma treatment to become a larger part of my practice.
Across all of these areas, the work that matters most to me is helping people understand what has shaped them, change patterns that are making life harder, and have more freedom to live the way they want to live now. I try to offer the kind of support I would have wanted at difficult points in my own life: compassionate, grounded in reality, practical, and focused on meaningful change.
Experience and Approach
I bring more than 30 years of experience in helping professions to this work. Over the course of my career as a teacher, trainer, counselor, therapist, and coach, I’ve helped many people learn skills, strategies, and tools to move toward what matters most to them, while also helping them feel understood, valued, and less alone in what they’re going through.
In my 19 years as a psychotherapist, I’ve drawn heavily from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Buddhist psychology, mindfulness-based approaches, and other evidence-based therapies. These approaches have shaped both the way I work with clients and the way I’ve handled challenges in my own life. I use and practice the same kinds of strategies I teach, because I want to offer tools that are practical, realistic, and useful in everyday life.
Degrees, Credentials,
and Training
Degree & License
Master of Arts--Department of Graduate Psychology & Counseling
Clinical Mental Health Counseling Concentration
Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) in Maine, Lic. #: CC3678
Advanced & Specialized Trainings
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
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Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (FACT)
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Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT)
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ACT for People-Pleasing and Perfectionism
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Written Exposure Therapy (WET)
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Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET)
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Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
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Treating Adult Clients of Emotionally Immature Parents (ACEIPs)
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Mindfulness-Based Therapies and Buddhist Psychology
You don't have to figure it all out on your own.
Self-help books, social media, and AI can be very helpful. But sometimes you need an actual human being who listens deeply, understands the bigger picture, notices patterns you may not see yourself, and helps you figure out what will actually work for you.
That’s where I come in.