About Merry
Merry McKinnon is a California-licensed marriage and family therapist with 33 years of clinical experience. She focuses on helping people untangle anxiety, stress, grief, depression, low self-esteem, and ADHD-related struggles. Her work centers on building a respectful, steady therapeutic relationship where clients can start to see their strengths more clearly.
She has long experience helping people with neurodiversity concerns, including ADHD and learning differences. Those differences often show up as isolation, social anxiety, disorganization, or trouble in school or work, and she helps clients recognize how these patterns affect daily life.
Background and approach
She also has experience with high-functioning autism spectrum presentations and related processing disorders. Merry describes her approach as relational and uses behavioral and cognitive ideas to guide conversations and skill-building. Sessions typically look at current thoughts, habits, and relationship patterns while also practicing concrete coping strategies.
She balances practical steps with attention to how a person experiences themselves and others. She helps people work through motivation blocks, grief, guilt and shame, and issues around life purpose. She supports those who feel lonely or stuck and who want clearer routines, better communication, or a stronger sense of self.
Merry believes growth can happen at any stage and that people can learn new ways of handling setbacks. Her practice includes video, phone, live chat, and text-based messaging options for sessions. Merry works in English and practices in California.
Evidence-based approaches for online care
Merry commonly uses cognitive and behavioral ideas to help people change unhelpful thinking and build new habits. Cognitive approaches focus on identifying stressful or self-defeating thoughts and testing them in daily life. Behavioral techniques emphasize small, practical steps like routines, exposure to feared situations, or activity planning to reduce avoidance and boost mood.She also applies relational work that looks at how a person connects with others and themselves. This helps with communication problems, shame, and feelings of isolation by practicing new ways of relating and noticing interaction patterns. These approaches are often combined to match what a person needs in the moment.
Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist talks with each person about their goals, preferences, and what feels most useful. Together they monitor progress and adjust methods as needed so therapy stays practical and focused on real-life changes.
Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy more flexible. Video is useful for deeper conversations and face-to-face feel, while phone calls often work better when bandwidth is limited. Chat or messaging can fit quick check-ins, brief coaching, or when someone prefers not to be on camera. These options help people fit care into work, school, or busy family routines.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- ADHD
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Communication problems
- Depression
- Guilt and shame
- Intellectual disability
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Young adult issues
- Experience
- 33 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English
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