About Marla
Marla Gentile is a licensed counselor with four decades of clinical experience. She works from California and brings steady, practical support for people facing stress, anxiety, trauma, grief, and big life changes. Marla emphasizes each person’s strengths and treats clients as the experts on their own lives.
Her style is grounded and direct. Sessions focus on what feels most pressing and useful right now. She blends body-centered work with attachment and client-centered approaches to help people feel more grounded and connected to their own resources.
Background and approach
Marla has long experience helping people who face compassion fatigue, caregiving strain, illness, and career stress. She also supports those dealing with relationship and intimacy struggles, communication problems, and issues tied to family of origin. Practical coping skills are paired with deeper work on patterns like codependency, abandonment concerns, guilt, and shame.
Her training includes approaches such as EMDR and mindfulness alongside somatic and psychodynamic ideas. In session she may use grounding, breath-based awareness, and gentle tracking of bodily responses to stress. She helps people notice how their bodies and emotions link up and what small changes feel manageable.
Marla holds LPC and LPCC credentials and has practiced for many years in multiple states. Conversations are offered in English, and she is open to working with people internationally by remote formats. If someone wants to begin, the process starts with a short matching questionnaire and scheduling a first session.
How her approaches translate to online therapy
Somatic Therapy focuses on the body’s signals and simple, in-the-moment grounding. In online sessions this can mean guided breathing, noticing tension, and tracking how sensations change during a conversation, which can help with anxiety, trauma, and overwhelm.Attachment-Based Therapy looks at how early relationship patterns shape current needs and reactions. In remote work the therapist and client talk through relational patterns, practice new responses, and strengthen safety in the therapeutic relationship to support intimacy and communication concerns.
EMDR uses structured processing to help reduce the intensity of traumatic memories. Delivered remotely, it often involves brief bilateral stimulation or guided attention while the person recalls troubling memories, aiming to lessen stuck emotional responses.
Finding the right approach is part of the process. The therapist will collaborate with each person to choose or combine methods that match their goals, comfort level, and present concerns. Clients are invited to give feedback so the plan adjusts as needed.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. These options increase flexibility for scheduling, let people work from familiar settings, and allow follow-up between sessions when helpful. Licensed professionals can adapt exercises and pacing to fit each format so people can get steady support even when life is busy.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Attachment issues
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Divorce and separation
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 40 years
- Licensed
- California, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina
- Languages
- English