About LaVerne
LaVerne Merritt-Morrison is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) with three decades of experience in clinical counseling. She earned a master’s degree in clinical counseling with a major in Addiction Counseling and has longstanding work in addiction and related concerns. Her practice is based in New York and she offers services in English, including to international clients.
LaVerne focuses on practical, down-to-earth support for anxiety, stress, addiction, and depression. She also addresses relationship and intimacy issues, parenting strains, and career transitions.
Background and approach
Her work includes care for people facing trauma, loss, or complex co-occurring conditions such as dual diagnosis and personality-related concerns. Her sessions emphasize a client-centered stance that starts where each person is. She uses motivational interviewing to help people explore change and build motivation.
Cognitive behavioral techniques are used to notice unhelpful thoughts and try new behaviors. LaVerne brings a long background in substance-use therapy, dual-diagnosis work, and transitional housing support. That experience informs a practical approach to problems like addiction, compulsions, and coping with life changes.
She also has specialty training in compulsive gambling interventions. In the therapy room she aims to listen first and to help people feel understood. Sessions often focus on small steps that can ease panic, reduce anxiety, or break a pattern of shame and isolation.
People who want clear, steady guidance and a collaborative partner tend to do well with her style.
How her approaches translate to online therapy
LaVerne uses a client-centered approach that starts by listening to each person's story and priorities. This method focuses on understanding where someone is and shaping sessions around their needs, which can work well in video or text formats where conversation can be paced to the person.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, is used to identify unhelpful thoughts and try different behaviors. Online CBT often includes short exercises, thought records, and practical homework that can be done between sessions and reviewed by message or in a call.
Motivational Interviewing helps people find their own reasons to change and to build small, achievable steps. It pairs well with other techniques when someone is working on addiction, anxiety, or difficult life transitions, and it adapts easily to brief check-ins by phone or text.
Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with each person to decide which methods fit their goals and daily life. That plan can change as progress is made and needs shift.
Online sessions offer flexibility for different schedules and situations. Video calls allow more face-to-face connection, phone sessions can be a straightforward check-in without video, and live chat or text messaging supports quick updates, shorter check-ins, or ongoing reflection. These options help people keep therapy consistent even with busy or changing routines.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Career difficulties
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family conflicts
- Guilt and shame
- HIV / AIDS
- Impulsivity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Midlife crisis
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Stress, Anxiety
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 30 years
- Licensed
- New York
- Languages
- English
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