Erena DiGonis, LCSW-R, is a New York State Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Health Coach, and Certified Clinical Anxiety and Trauma Treatment Professional. She is also a Certified Brainspotting Therapist and has advanced training in EMDR and Pain Reprocessing Therapy. Erena has more than twenty-three years of clinical and professional experience as a therapist, educator, supervisor, and consultant. Throughout her career, she has worked in community mental health, psychiatric, residential, in-home, and private practice settings, providing care for hundreds of individuals with complex mental health needs.
Erena's expertise extends beyond direct clinical practice. As Assistant Director of Quality Improvement for multiple behavioral health programs, she was responsible for clinical documentation audits, treatment plan reviews, quality improvement initiatives, policy development, regulatory investigations, and preparing programs for reviews and surveys by the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH), Office for People With Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD), New York State Department of Health (DOH), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Council on Accreditation (COA). This experience allows her to teach documentation and ethics through both a clinician's and an auditor's lens, helping professionals create records that are clinically meaningful, ethically sound, compliant with regulatory expectations, and audit-ready.
Erena is the Founder and Continuing Education Director of EngagedMinds, a national continuing education organization providing evidence-informed training for social workers, counselors, therapists, and psychologists. She is a sought-after writer, speaker, and consultant whose work has been featured in Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Psychology Today, Reader's Digest, Women's Health, and MEL Magazine. She has served as a reviewer for the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Press and is an Advisory Board Member for the CPTSD Foundation.
