About Merle
Merle Montalvo is a licensed clinical social worker with 23 years of experience in Mississippi. She helps people who are feeling stressed, anxious, depressed, grieving, or burned out. She also supports those facing relationship strain, trauma, life changes, ADHD, and career questions.
Her approach is practical and person-focused. Sessions are conversational and structured when needed. She blends ideas from different methods so the work fits each person rather than forcing a single style.
How Merle works
Merle's background includes work in outpatient clinics, inpatient settings, intensive outpatient programs, home health, and hospice care. Those roles gave her experience with medical and end-of-life concerns, mood disorders, post-traumatic stress, and compassion fatigue. In sessions she may use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people change unhelpful thinking and behavior.
She also draws on mindfulness to build present-moment awareness and solution-focused strategies to set short-term goals. Motivational Interviewing and psychodynamic ideas can appear when exploring motivation or underlying patterns. She describes her own path into social work as a midlife transition, which shaped how she supports people making big life changes.
Merle aims to meet each person where they are and adjust the pace to their needs.
Merle lists 5 ways of working on the entry:
What Merle works with
The areas below are the ones Merle selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- Stress, Anxiety
- Grief
- Anger management
Also listed
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Career difficulties
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Training and background
| Register | LCSW |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 23 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Mississippi |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
Therapeutic approaches for online care
Merle often uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people notice and change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. CBT is practical and useful for anxiety, depression, stress, and mood concerns. She also incorporates Mindfulness Therapy to teach simple awareness and breathing practices that reduce reactivity and improve focus.Motivational Interviewing is another approach she brings when people are weighing big changes or feeling stuck. It focuses on personal goals and strengthens a person's own reasons for change. Together these methods can address grief, trauma, career transitions, and coping with life shifts in a collaborative way.
Choosing the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will talk with each person about their goals, preferences, and past experiences. Together they decide which techniques to try and adjust them as needed so the plan fits the individual.
Online therapy offers flexibility and several ways to connect. Video calls let people have a longer, face-to-face conversation. Phone sessions can fit into a work break or require less bandwidth. Live chat and text-based messaging are useful for brief check-ins, skill practice, or when writing helps someone process thoughts. These options make it easier to schedule care and keep momentum between appointments.
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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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