About Mary
Mary Kay Zayani greets people with calm and practical support. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker - LCSW - with 25 years in the mental health field and works by listening first. Her style is gentle and direct, aimed at helping someone find clearer choices during stress, loss, or major life changes.
Mary Kay helps people who are dealing with anxiety, depression, grief, relationship and intimacy struggles, and issues around work and career.
Background and approach
She also supports those facing questions about parenting, body image, addictions, and ADHD. Conversations focus on what is happening now and what steps feel doable next. Her approach blends attachment-based thinking, client-centered listening, and practical cognitive-behavioral techniques.
That means she pays attention to relationship patterns, follows each person’s priorities, and offers ways to shift unhelpful thoughts and habits. Sessions often include steady emotional support alongside concrete tools to try between meetings. Mary Kay trained at Columbia University and holds licenses in New York and California.
She draws on long experience to help people untangle relationship wounds, cope with loss, and get unstuck when life feels overwhelming. Her manner aims to validate feelings while encouraging small, sensible changes. In sessions she acts as a calm, nonjudgmental presence who asks questions, reflects what she hears, and helps people locate their own answers.
The work is collaborative and paced to each person’s needs, whether the focus is stabilizing emotions, improving communication, or making a life change.
How her approaches translate to online therapy
Mary Kay uses attachment-based ideas to look at how patterns from past relationships affect current feelings and behavior. This helps when someone feels stuck in cycles of distance, clinginess, or repeated hurt and wants clearer ways to relate.She also uses client-centered techniques, which means the session follows the person’s priorities and pace. The therapist listens closely, reflects what she hears, and supports people in finding their own answers rather than giving directives.
Cognitive-behavioral methods appear as straightforward tools to test and change unhelpful thoughts and habits. These are useful for managing anxiety, low mood, and repetitive negative thinking by practicing small experiments between sessions.
Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. Mary Kay will help identify which methods feel most useful based on a person’s goals, history, and preferences, and she adjusts the plan as things change over time.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. Video is helpful for face-to-face conversation and nonverbal cues, phone can work when bandwidth is limited or a shorter check-in is needed, and messaging supports brief updates or ongoing coaching between meetings. These options make scheduling more flexible and can help therapy fit into busy lives.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Grief
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Attachment issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 25 years
- Licensed
- California, New York
- Languages
- English