Dallas Counselor - Dallas Councelor - Mary Sanger, LPC, LCDC, LMFTA

Mary Sanger, LPC, LCDC, LMFTA
Event planner, the LifeWorks Group, P.A.

Mary works with individuals (including children), families, couples and groups. She helps clients promote healing and growth, specializing in the following areas:

Addiction and compulsive behaviors. This includes abuse with alcohol or drugs as well as sex, love, and gambling. Mary works with the person exhibiting these destructive behaviors as well as their family members and loved ones. She provides assessments and consultation with family members and ongoing therapy. Mary works with clients in all stages of recovery and addresses the core patterns that have caused repeated return to self-destructive behaviors. She helps families establish a healthy and supportive recovery environment.

Co-dependency. Mary works with individuals and couples that experience difficulty in forming and maintaining healthy relationships because of enmeshment, enabling, and poor boundaries.Couples and Families. Mary works with couples (including same-sex couples) who are experiencing relationship, intimacy, sexual, and communication difficulties. She provides marital, pre-marital, help with parenting, and family counseling.

Trauma. Mary works with adults and children who have experienced sexual, physical or emotional abuse.

Group Therapy. Mary also offers group therapy in various areas, including addiction, co-dependency and relationships.

Mary’s approach to therapy assumes that every person instinctively develops towards becoming autonomous, able to think, feel, and act as an individual, while also driven to remain emotionally connected to others. Families and relationships inherently have anxiety as an outcome of struggling to balance the desires for togetherness and autonomy. A highly self-differentiated person is able to manage his emotions and intellect and thus better able to manage this process. Clients learn through the therapeutic process to recognize and change unproductive, self-destructive and self-limiting attitudes and behaviors. Mary ‘s therapy style is gentle and respectful, but direct. She educates clients with information to enable them to raise their level of self-differentiation to create a happier, healthier, more productive life.

Mary started with LifeWorks in the spring of 2007. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist associate, a licensed professional counselor, and a chemical dependency counselor. She is a member of American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. After working for 20 years in the corporate and business world (most recently Mary worked in the hospitality industry), Mary returned to school and obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology from Argosy University. Before coming to LifeWorks, Mary worked for several years as a Chemical Dependency Counselor with Solutions Outpatient Services.

When she’s not at LifeWorks, Mary spends much of her time volunteering for several civic organizations She is currently president of a local chapter of a national women’s philanthropic educational organization. She enjoys cooking, entertaining, reading, jewelry making, and spending time with her husband, Laurence, and their wonder dog, Spanky, in their East Dallas home.