About Vicki
Vicki Marcum is a licensed clinical social worker with forty years of experience helping people navigate stress, anxiety, grief, depression, and life changes. She offers a thoughtful, person-focused approach that begins with listening. Vicki aims to build trust first, then uses practical tools to address the problems at hand.
Her practice draws on attachment-based ideas and client-centered care to create a warm, respectful space. She also uses cognitive behavioral techniques and emotion-focused work when they match a person’s goals.
Background and approach
Vicki adjusts her style to what each person needs rather than following one fixed method. Over four decades she has worked across many settings, including inpatient psychiatric care, outpatient community mental health, emergency and crisis services, schools, and community agencies in Illinois.
That breadth of experience shaped her ability to help people with parenting concerns, family and relationship issues, trauma and abuse, compassion fatigue, and complex mood and attention concerns like bipolar disorder and ADHD. Vicki places emphasis on collaboration. She helps people talk through options, try different approaches, and decide what fits them best.
She describes therapy as a partnership where the client leads their treatment and she offers guidance, challenge, and support as needed. Sessions address everyday stresses as well as deeper issues such as attachment wounds, adoption and foster care concerns, body image, codependency, and past family-of-origin problems.
Vicki’s style is direct but compassionate, aiming to help people come away feeling clearer and more able to cope.
Combining attachment work and practical strategies online
Attachment-based work focuses on relationships and how early bonds shape current emotional patterns; it helps when people struggle with trust, closeness, or recurring relationship wounds. Client-centered therapy emphasizes respectful listening and collaboration, giving people space to set the pace and goals of their work. Cognitive behavioral techniques look at thoughts and actions and teach concrete skills to manage anxiety, mood, and unhelpful behaviors.Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the process. The therapist will talk with each person about goals and preferences and together they will decide which methods to try. This collaborative planning means the approach can shift over time as needs change.
Online therapy offers practical flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation when more depth is needed. Phone sessions can work well when bandwidth or camera use is an issue. Live chat and text-based messaging make it easier to check in between sessions or fit short updates into a busy day. Using these formats, a licensed professional can tailor timing, pace, and tools to fit each person’s life and goals.
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating disorders
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 40 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English