Welcome to My Virtual Office
About The Therapist
I'm Marlene Decker, MFT, and for nearly 40 years I've walked alongside individuals, couples, and families through their most challenging moments. From your softest chair, let us begin.
My Mission
I blend personal somatic experience with layers of deep listening for the safety and care that makes space for profound change to unfold. Moments of connection arise when the noise stops, the room becomes a safe place for empathic attunement with the hurried self in the presence of another. I acknowledge the sacred space each member of a couple carry as well as the trauma based wounds that dysregulate even the most well intentioned. We can rewire our nervous systems to invite more functional patterns for improved communication, improved self-esteem, improved boundary setting, individuation within a healthy relationship that flourishes.
We can move from an external locus of control (people pleasing, shame, guilt) to an internal locus of control (self-management, resilience, joyful aliveness in mind and body).
"For love, all love of other sights removes, And makes one little room an everywhere."
— John Donne
More About Me.
When I was a small girl of seven in a wool plaid skirt I looked across the dining room table to the snow-covered rooftops of Chicago, in winter, and knew I'd be a family therapist and a writer. I am. I follow the original family therapy mentor Virginia Satir and the recovery and relapse prevention innovators Terence Gorski and Roland Williams, utilizing my varied training to address the presenting problem with a uniquely person-centered approach, assisting each client to find their voice of wholeness and move past depression, anxiety, grief, relationship struggles, ineffective learned behaviors and carried trauma.
Trauma is a feedback loop that informs our view of the world. We can interrupt our learned patterns of dysfunction, our survival strategies which keep us looking for cues of danger, keep our nervous systems on high alert. Because we are wounded in relationship, we heal in relationship. With empathic attunement my clients can find or reclaim the safety, the ease in our physical selves, the felt sense of belonging we were all meant to know. Little steps toward big and welcome changes.
Choose experience. I bring my background of teaching in the Chicago barrio, technology work in Silicon Valley, addiction studies to acquire CAADAC and MAC certifications and twenty years of responding to the emergency room at Good Samaritan hospital for psychiatric and substance abuse emergencies as well as inpatient and outpatient assignments, initial assessments, family and dual diagnoses groups. I work well with individuals managing symptoms of attention disorders, so often misdiagnosed as anxiety or depression or missed entirely.
As a writer I am uniquely suited to aid the creative population as mentor and therapist. And we have fun.