About Polly
Polly Mortensen is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) based in New York. She brings 21 years of experience and a calm, practical presence to sessions. Many people come to her feeling overwhelmed by stress, anxiety, or life changes and she aims to make the first steps easier to take.
She uses clear, down-to-earth conversation to help clients notice strengths and try small changes. Polly often draws on client-centered methods to create a respectful, nonjudgmental space.
Background and approach
She also uses cognitive behavioral strategies to identify unhelpful thinking and DBT skills for emotion regulation and coping. Her background includes work in psychiatric rehabilitation, home-based therapy, and vocational and rehabilitation counseling. That mix gave her experience with long-term mental health needs, trauma, and barriers related to disability and work.
She has also worked with members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people in foster care situations. Sessions frequently focus on practical goals like managing anxiety, handling grief, improving self-esteem, or sorting career options. Polly helps people break big problems into manageable steps and practices skills between meetings.
She explains tools in simple terms and adapts tasks to each person's daily life. Polly is comfortable using mindfulness and motivational interviewing alongside solution-focused planning when helpful. Her style is warm and collaborative, aimed at helping people build steady habits that support change over time.
Approaches and online care that fit daily life
Polly commonly uses client-centered therapy, which focuses on listening closely and letting a person set the pace and goals. That approach is helpful when someone needs a respectful space to sort feelings and make decisions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, is another frequent tool; it helps identify patterns of thought that fuel anxiety or low mood and teaches practical ways to test and shift those patterns.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Polly will discuss different methods and help choose or combine approaches based on a person’s goals, needs, and preferences. The aim is to try things that feel useful and to adjust if something isn’t working.
Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to match different routines. Video calls allow fuller interaction and visual cues, phone sessions use less bandwidth and can fit a break at work, live chat is good for quick check-ins, and messaging lets someone reflect between sessions. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent around school, work, or caregiving duties.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Family conflicts
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 21 years
- Licensed
- New York
- Languages
- English
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