About Marcia
Marcia Pontoni is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 25 years of experience helping people through hard life moments. She focuses on relationship difficulties, grief and loss, anxiety, depression, and issues that come with major life changes. She emphasizes respect, compassion, and sensitivity in every conversation.
Her approach blends practical tools and thoughtful listening. She uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people notice unhelpful thoughts and try new behavior patterns.
Background and approach
Mindfulness practices are used to reduce stress and bring attention back to the present moment. Marcia adapts sessions to each person’s needs. She works with concerns like addiction, trauma and abuse, intimacy-related issues, anger, and compassion fatigue.
She also supports people facing aging and geriatric concerns, cancer, hospice and end-of-life counseling, and caregiving strain. Longstanding family patterns and communication problems are common topics in her work. She helps people untangle family of origin issues, codependency, forgiveness, and problems around infidelity and jealousy.
Her style balances listening with clear steps to try between sessions. Marcia primarily meets by video and by phone, and also uses live chat or text-based messaging when that fits the person’s needs. She tailors the plan and the pace to match goals and life circumstances, and she guides people toward changes they can manage day to day.
How Marcia’s approaches translate to online therapy
Marcia uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people spot and change patterns of thinking that increase distress. CBT is focused and practical, useful for anxiety, depression, relationship stress, and addictive behaviors. Mindfulness Therapy is also part of her work and teaches simple attention and breathing skills to reduce reactivity and improve calm in daily life.Choosing the right approach is part of the process. She collaborates with each person to decide which methods fit their needs, goals, and preferences. Together they may mix listening, skills practice, and short experiments you can try between sessions to see what helps.
Online sessions offer options to match different routines. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and shared visual cues. Phone sessions are a good fit when bandwidth is limited or when a shorter check-in is needed. Live chat and text-based messaging let people send updates, coping steps, or brief reflections between meetings and can help keep momentum between sessions.
Frequently asked questions
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What is her background and experience?
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Specialties and expertise
Also works with
- Addictions
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Cancer
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Postpartum depression
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Self-harm
- Stress, Anxiety
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English