About Mary
Mary Hargarten is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) with 25 years of experience. She practices from Wisconsin and offers care both online and in person. Mary focuses on practical help for anxiety, stress, depression, relationship concerns, and life transitions.
She uses straightforward, collaborative methods to help people find coping skills that fit their lives. Sessions often explore how thoughts, actions, and family patterns affect current problems.
Background and approach
Mary emphasizes developing strengths and small, doable changes rather than long lists of tasks. Mary pays attention to how family background shapes beliefs and behavior. That can include communication patterns, forgiveness, or lingering hurt from past abuse.
She helps people separate what they inherited from what they want for themselves now. Her style is warm, direct, and often gently humorous. She aims to listen closely and step into a client’s shoes to understand their point of view.
Clients are treated as the experts on their lives while she offers tools and structure to reach goals. Therapy sessions may include mindfulness skills, goal-focused work, and exercises that examine thoughts and behaviors. Mary also supports people dealing with grief, caregiving stress, intimacy issues, panic, and mood challenges.
She helps clients find balance across emotional, physical, and social areas of life.
Practical approaches for online therapy and coping
Mary often draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help people notice their thoughts and choose actions that match their values. ACT helps when worry, avoidance, or painful emotions get in the way of living the life someone wants.She also uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to look at the links between thoughts, feelings, and behavior. CBT provides step-by-step techniques for reducing anxiety, managing panic, and changing unhelpful thinking patterns.
Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work together. Mary treats clients as partners in deciding which methods fit their goals and comfort level, adjusting strategies based on progress and feedback.
Online sessions give practical flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and exercises that benefit from visual cues. Phone sessions can be quicker check-ins or a lower-bandwidth option. Live chat and text messaging work well for brief updates, homework support, or short problem-solving between longer sessions. These formats help people fit therapy into busy lives and maintain continuity when schedules or locations change.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
Also listed
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Bipolar disorder
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Postpartum depression
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- Wisconsin
- Languages
- English
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