Mary Shands, LPC

Mary Shands is a Licensed Professional Counselor with 12 years of clinical experience. She holds LPC credentials in Missouri and Texas and has worked across schools, treatment centers, and insurance settings. Mary listens closely and brings an energetic, caring style to sessions.

She draws on practical methods like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and client-centered work to help people manage stress, depression, anxiety, and addiction-related concerns. Sessions often focus on concrete steps and skills that can be used between meetings. Mary also offers support around trauma, grief, intimacy-related issues, and sleep or eating concerns.

Her background includes roles in special education, substance use treatment, veteran services, and sexual offender programming. That range gives her experience with many different life situations and transitions. She also offers talks and trainings for organizations.

In the therapy room she emphasizes clear communication and active listening. Mary tends to combine structured techniques with time to reflect and process emotions. She works with people who want practical tools as well as personal insight.

People seeking help for parenting strain, relationship stress, career pressure, or burnout often find her approach straightforward and goal-focused. Mary also supports those coping with first responder stress, adoption and separation issues, and compassion fatigue. She tailors sessions to what each person needs in the moment.

How Mary’s Approaches Fit Online Care

Attachment-Based Therapy looks at how early bonds affect current relationships and emotional patterns. It can help people who struggle with trust, abandonment feelings, or close relationships by naming interaction patterns and building new responses.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on the links between thoughts, feelings, and actions. It teaches practical skills for managing anxiety, depression, and coping with life changes through clear exercises and behavior experiments that translate well to online sessions.

Finding the right approach is part of the work. Mary will collaborate with each person to choose methods that match their goals, needs, and preferences. That might mean starting with skill-building in CBT and adding attachment or emotion-focused work as trust grows.

Online therapy offers flexibility in how people meet with a therapist. Video calls let the session feel most like an in-person visit, phone sessions use less bandwidth, live chat supports brief check-ins, and text-based messaging can work for ongoing reflections between meetings. Those options make it easier to fit therapy into work, family, or caregiving routines while keeping consistent progress.