About Makini
Makini Leno is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) based in Texas with five years of clinical experience. She focuses on practical help for relationship tension, intimacy concerns, parenting stress, life transitions, and challenges related to attention and focus. Makini aims to make starting therapy feel less scary and more manageable for people who are unsure where to begin.
She creates a calm, nonjudgmental space where clients can say what they think and feel.
Background and approach
Sessions center on clear conversation and small steps that can be tried between meetings. Makini encourages people to name what matters most to them and then work toward those goals at a steady pace. Her approach draws on methods that help with thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
That can look like learning skills to manage strong feelings, testing out new ways of communicating, or building routines to support attention and memory. Makini adapts practical strategies to each person rather than using a single formula. She also brings attention to relationship patterns and attachment needs when they come up in therapy.
This helps uncover how past relationships affect present behavior and closeness. The focus is on clearer understanding and more effective choices in everyday interactions. Makini works with a wide range of personal issues including adoption and foster care concerns, autism and Asperger syndrome related challenges, caregiving stress, blended family questions, and navigating separation or divorce.
Her style is straightforward, warm, and collaborative, aimed at helping people find workable changes they can keep using.
Practical approaches and online therapy options
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, focuses on helping people notice thoughts and feelings without getting stuck in them. It supports choosing values-based actions even when emotions feel difficult, which can help with relationship choices and life transitions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at the links between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and teaches skills to adjust unhelpful thinking and build new habits; this is often useful for attention, memory, and coping strategies.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with each person to decide which methods suit their goals and preferences. That may mean blending ACT and CBT techniques or pulling in attachment-focused ideas to address relationship patterns. Clients and therapist check progress and adjust the plan together over time.
Online therapy is offered through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to make scheduling easier. Video is helpful for face-to-face conversation and practicing communication skills. Phone sessions can be a good fit when bandwidth is limited or a quieter check-in is needed. Live chat and text messaging allow shorter check-ins, faster updates between sessions, and flexibility for busy days.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Relationship issues
- Intimacy-related issues
- Parenting issues
Also listed
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture
- Blended family issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Multicultural concerns
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual dysfunction
- Somatization
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 5 years
- Licensed
- Texas
- Languages
- English
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