• 15 years professional counseling experience
• undergraduate work in Psychology and Sociology: Fredonia State College
• graduate work in Counseling: St. Bonaventure University
• Inducted into Chi Sigma Iota (International Honor Society for Counseling) October 2003

Ms. Dittmar has researched and written a variety of articles on the subject of e-Counseling, e-Therapy, Cyber-Counseling, "distance counseling" and telecounseling. Her findings?

• E-Counseling provides many benefits for certain groups:
  • Executives and people who travel frequently. Internet counseling is available globally online.
  • Celebrities, media personalities or political office-holders who wish to remain anonymous
  • People who live in remote areas
  • People who live in small towns who want to protect their anonymity
  • Anyone who wishes to remain anonymous
  • Those with difficulty traveling due to physical or mental disabilities
  • Others who can't travel easily because of no car, no license, bad weather or other unusual circumstances
• The anonymity of E-Counseling often provides more candid input, which allows the counselor to provide better analysis of the issues.
• E-mail and Live Chat options require people to think about their responses more thoroughly than they might in conversation, leading to better understanding.
• E-Counseling provides a record of the "conversation," which can be reviewed multiple times, compared with a conversation, which is not (in most cases)

Ms. Dittmar acknowledges several drawbacks to E-Counseling as it stands currently. It is not consistently effective in treating suicidal individuals. For certain types of therapy, visual cues and reactions are helpful to the analysis and prognosis. As internet technologies increase, the limitations begin to diminish.

Ms. Dittmar is devoted to providing highly responsive and quality counseling to every qualified client.