About Marlene
Marlene Merchant uses practical, skills-based therapies to help people make steady changes. She combines cognitive behavioral techniques with mindfulness and motivational interviewing to target problems and build useful habits. Marlene is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, LMHC, based in New York with ten years of experience working with adults on common life concerns.
She focuses on stress, anxiety, depression, and addiction and also helps people facing trauma and eating-related struggles.
Background and approach
Marlene works with issues tied to relationships, grief, sleep, parenting strain, and self-esteem. She pays attention to how daily routines and thoughts affect mood and behavior. Her sessions tend to be goal-oriented and concrete.
People learn skills to challenge unhelpful thinking, practice present-moment awareness, and strengthen motivation for change. She often breaks larger goals into small steps and tracks progress over time. Marlene also addresses concerns such as body image, communication problems, obsessive-compulsive patterns, and coping with disaster-related stress.
She makes room for conversations about guilt, shame, and forgiveness while helping people plan practical coping strategies. Therapy can include short-term problem solving or longer work on habits and meaning. Marlene encourages self-care habits and offers straightforward tools clients can try between sessions.
She welcomes questions and helps people decide which next steps feel realistic for their lives.
Practical therapies that work well online
CBT, Mindfulness Therapy, and Motivational Interviewing each translate well to online formats. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps people notice and change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors; it is useful for anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and some obsessive patterns. Mindfulness Therapy teaches simple attention and breathing practices to reduce reactivity and improve focus, which can help stress and eating-related struggles. Motivational Interviewing supports people who are unsure about change by strengthening their own reasons and plans for taking steps forward.Choosing the best approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk with the client about goals and preferences, try techniques, and adjust the plan as progress is made. That way the work evolves to match what actually helps the person in daily life.
Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make scheduling easier. Video is useful for full sessions and nonverbal cues, phone works when bandwidth is limited, live chat can be a shorter check-in, and text-based messaging lets someone share between sessions. These options help people fit therapy into busy routines and keep momentum between appointments.
Frequently asked questions
What concerns does Marlene address?
What is her therapeutic style like?
How much clinical experience does she have?
Where is she licensed and located?
Which languages are supported?
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How is cost handled?
What are the first steps to begin?
Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed
- New York
- Languages
- English