About Mary
Mary McLaggan is a Licensed Professional Counselor, LPC, and a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, LMHC, with 20 years of clinical experience. She focuses on helping people who are feeling stressed, anxious, low in self-esteem, or facing major life changes. Mary speaks English and Spanish and works with adults who want a clear, respectful place to talk through difficult problems.
Her approach is practical and person-centered. Sessions are driven by what the client needs that week.
How Mary works
She listens first, then suggests skills and small experiments to try between sessions. Mary uses tools drawn from cognitive behavioral work and dialectical skills to help manage overwhelming emotions and improve daily functioning. Mary also draws on attachment-based and existential ideas to address relationship patterns and questions about meaning.
That can look like mapping how early relationships shaped current reactions, or naming values that guide choices. She adapts these perspectives to fit each person’s life and goals. Over two decades she has helped people with depression, ADHD, grief, trauma and intimacy concerns, among other issues.
She also supports people navigating parenting stress, career questions, body image, and caregiving strain. Sessions can include behavior-focused practice, emotion regulation skills, or reflective conversation depending on what will be most useful. Mary emphasizes collaboration.
Together she and the client build a plan with concrete steps and ways to measure progress. The tone in sessions is respectful, calm, and straightforward.
Mary lists 11 ways of working on the entry:
What Mary works with
The areas below are the ones Mary selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Immigration issues
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Registers | LPC, LMHC |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 20 |
| Languages | English, Spanish |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Iowa |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
Therapeutic approaches you can use online
Mary blends cognitive behavioral work with attachment-based ideas to help people notice unhelpful thoughts and change patterns that cause distress. CBT focuses on identifying thinking and behavior patterns and testing small experiments to change symptoms like anxiety or sleep problems. Attachment-based work looks at how early relationship experiences shape current reactions and helps people try new ways of relating and feeling safer in close connections.Finding the right approach is part of the work together. Mary will listen to your goals and try methods that match your needs and preferences. She adjusts techniques as you go, making changes when something feels unhelpful and building on what works in your daily life.
Online sessions can be done by video, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to fit your routine. Video calls let you have fuller conversations and see nonverbal cues. Phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited or you need to fit a session into a short break. Live chat and text messaging work well for quick check-ins, brief skill practice, or when writing helps you process thoughts. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent while managing work, caregiving, or other responsibilities.
Start online instead of waiting
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Common questions
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A practical next step
Write down two things you would want to be different in six months. That is the most useful thing to bring to a first session, whoever it is with. If you would rather start now than keep reading, online sessions are the quickest route.
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