Shelby Ruman, MS, LPC
Licensed Professional Counselor · couples, women’s issues, grief & life transitions
Shelby’s passion is working with individuals encountering grief and life transitions, and those struggling with or navigating through substance use/addiction, as well as anxiety, depression, and stress management. She is also couples therapists at Gryzbek Therapy; and the clinician most clients meet first when the work is relational, postpartum, or in the women’s-life-stage stretch where identity, motherhood, and partnership all shift at once. She sees adults, couples, and older adolescents in Naperville and across Illinois telehealth.
- Couples & marriage work using ACT, CBT, and attachment-based methods
- Postpartum, women’s issues, life transitions, and adolescent therapy
- In-network with BCBS PPO, Aetna PPO, UHC PPO
Currently accepting new clients. Matched within 1 business day.
Naperville office · Illinois telehealth
Verified training, verified license, verified scope
Where Shelby’s training fits best
Couples Therapy →
Communication breakdowns, repair work after rupture, sex and intimacy concerns, and the slow drift partnerships fall into when nobody’s paying attention. Gottman-informed and attachment-based.
Marriage Counseling →
Long-term partnerships in the middle stretch — identity shifts, parenting strain, sexual disconnection, recommitment work. Pre-marital and structured marriage repair both fit Shelby’s scope.
Postpartum Therapy →
Perinatal mood and anxiety, intrusive thoughts, identity disorientation, the relational tax of new parenthood. Shelby is one of three clinicians who carry postpartum work at Gryzbek.
Women’s Issues →
Identity work across life stages — career, motherhood, partnership, midlife.
Grief Therapy →
Recent losses of loved ones, prolonged grief, loss in general.
Adolescent Therapy →
Older adolescents and emerging adults across anxiety, identity, and family-system strain.
Life Transitions →
Career shifts, relocations, divorce, grief, and the in-between years that don’t have a clean name.
How Shelby works in the room
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT is values-based work — less about suppressing difficult thoughts and more about choosing actions that line up with what actually matters to you. For postpartum clients exhausted by intrusive thoughts, women navigating identity shifts, or partners stuck in defensive cycles, ACT gives a framework for moving forward without waiting for hard feelings to disappear first.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT gives clients tools they can carry out of session and how to spot the thought patterns that drive a panic spiral, a marital argument, or a 3 AM spiral, and how to interrupt them before they take over.
Attachment-based work & Gottman Method
For couples and marriage work, Shelby pairs attachment-based methods with Gottman Method interventions: structured tools to repair conversations, rebuilding friendship and intimacy, and breaking the four communication patterns Gottman research identifies as the highest predictors of relationship breakdown.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative therapy is a collaborative, non-pathologizing counseling approach that views clients as the experts of their own lives, helping them separate themselves from their problems by externalizing and rewriting their personal stories. By incorporating this concept into your practice’s website copy, you can naturally integrate highly searched, intent-based keywords—such as “externalizing problems” or “reauthoring life stories”—that match how clients search for meaning and healing online.
Who Shelby sees
What to expect, billing-wise
In-network plans
BCBS PPO, Aetna PPO, and United Healthcare PPO. Shelby is paneled on the same plans as the rest of the team. Insurance does not restrict which clinician you can see.
Out-of-network billing
For plans outside our panel, the practice bills out-of-network benefits on your behalf. You don’t submit superbills yourself.
Telehealth scope
Illinois clients only.
Session length & duration
Individual and couples sessions run 55 minutes; telehealth runs 60 minutes.
A counselor’s job is to create the room — the work is yours
Shelby holds a Master of Science degree and works as a Licensed Counselor at Gryzbek Therapy. Her clinical work centers on the relational and women’s-life-stage stretch of mental health — couples and marriage repair, grief, and identity work, family-system therapy, adolescent therapy, and the broader category of women’s issues across career, motherhood, partnership, and midlife.
Her clinical approach is integrative with a heavy emphasis on evidence-based treatment. Shelby pulls from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, attachment-based methods, Narrative Therapy, and Gottman-informed couples interventions. She thinks of therapy less as a checklist project and more as collaborative work with warmth, kindness, and humor in the room, paired with concrete tools clients can carry between sessions.
No two journeys in therapy are the same, the work has to be shaped to fit the person sitting across the room.
For couples work, Shelby leans on Gottman-method frameworks for the structured side to repair conversations, rebuild intimacy after rupture, identify the four communication patterns research links to relationship breakdown — alongside attachment-based work for the underneath layer of what each partner is asking for and rarely getting. For postpartum and women’s-issues clients, she works at the intersection of mood, identity, and the relational system surrounding them. Sessions use values-based ACT work, especially when intrusive thoughts, exhaustion, or the disorientation of identity shift have flattened forward motion.
Shelby describes herself as a multiculturally-informed counselor who works to meet clients of any background or identity where they are. The judgment-free environment she builds in session is the foundation for success while also providing practical steps and structured frameworks all sit on top of that. Her clinical work at Gryzbek Therapy is rooted in an MS in Clinical Psychology from Benedictine University and Illinois LPC licensure (#178.019782 which runs alongside her ongoing facilitation work at Northwestern Medicine Living Well Cancer Resources, where she leads support groups for patients and families navigating cancer and grief. That second context informs how she sits with grief, ambiguous loss, and the way major medical or life events reshape relationships and identity.
Outside of clinical work, Shelby is a serious gardener of tomatoes, vegetable varieties, and at least one luffa sponge in the rotation. She travels, cooks internationally, and shares her life with her dog and husband. Clients meeting her for the first time tend to notice the same thing: the room feels lighter than they expected. That’s by design.
Where else to find Shelby
LinkedIn · Psychology Today · Zocdoc · TherapyDen · NPI Registry (NPI 1659158087) · IDFPR License Lookup (#178.019782)
Services Shelby provides
Couples Therapy · Marriage Counseling · Grief Therapy · Postpartum Therapy · Women’s Issues · Adolescent Therapy · Life Transitions
START WITH SHELBY
Couples work, grief, or the women’s-life-stage stretch — Shelby is taking new clients.
Naperville office or secure Illinois telehealth. Matched within 1 business day.