About Mary
Mary Blair is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) based in South Dakota with 18 years of clinical experience. She has worked in psychotherapy, hospice care, hospital chaplaincy, and consultation. Her work often focuses on stress, anxiety, grief, depression, and relationship challenges.
She sees each person as a whole person - mind, body, and spirit - and aims to match sessions to what feels most useful in the moment. Her style is client-centered, which means clients guide the pace and focus while she offers tools and observations to move things forward.
Background and approach
Mary blends several therapeutic methods to meet practical needs. She draws on psychodynamic ideas to look at past patterns and on somatic and trauma-focused techniques to address how the body holds stress. Mindfulness practices are used to help people manage difficult thoughts and feelings in daily life.
Therapy sessions tend to be collaborative and paced to the person. Mary encourages clients to notice what the body and mind are signaling, and to use that information to shape goals and next steps. She aims for clear, compassionate conversation rather than jargon.
People come to her for things like coping with life changes, parenting stress, intimacy concerns, grief after loss, career transitions, and compassion fatigue. She also works with issues related to attachment, aging, first responder stress, and medical-related challenges such as cancer or hospice care. Mary values steady progress and practical coping strategies.
She invites clients to take an active role in therapy while offering guidance drawn from nearly two decades of clinical work.
Bringing client-centered and trauma-aware work online
Mary often uses client-centered work to let the person lead the conversation. This means sessions focus on what feels most important to the client and the therapist follows that direction to identify next steps and supports.She also uses trauma-focused methods and somatic ideas to address how past events affect both feelings and bodily sensations. Trauma-focused work helps people name and process difficult experiences, while somatic approaches pay attention to tension and sensations that show up during stress or anxiety.
Finding the right approach is part of the process. Mary will talk with clients about their goals, symptoms, and preferences and then decide together which methods to emphasize. The plan can change over time as needs shift.
Online therapy offers flexible ways to meet. Video calls let people use face-to-face conversation and visual cues, phone sessions work well when bandwidth or camera use is limited, and live chat or text messaging can provide shorter check-ins or ongoing support between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy days, maintain continuity during life changes, and access care from different locations.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Relationship issues
- Grief
- Self esteem
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Attachment issues
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Co-morbidity
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Eating disorders
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Stress, Anxiety
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 18 years
- Licensed
- South Dakota
- Languages
- English
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