I’m Mandy Bowlin, LCSW, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 20 years of experience helping adults navigate relationship challenges. I offer individual therapy, family therapy, couples therapy, and Discernment Counseling for clients located in Missouri, Illinois, Florida, and Oregon. My work focuses on helping individuals, couples, and adult family members understand the patterns that keep them feeling stuck and develop healthier ways of relating to themselves and one another.

I came to this field after discovering my interest in psychology and through my own lived experience.

As a recovering avoidant, people-pleasing, self-sacrificing human, therapy helped me learn how to be more direct, ask for what I need, and feel secure enough in myself to have more satisfying relationships. It changed my personal life and shaped how I show up as a therapist.

Much of my early career was spent in crisis settings. I valued the unpredictability and fast pace but I missed sitting with people over time and helping them make sense of their inner worlds and relationship patterns. I find that I can still tap into those crisis skills when appropriate in session, and they are especially helpful in Discernment Counseling.

I live for the moments when clients connect the dots between their past and present and realize, “Oh… that’s why I do what I do.” Those moments bring relief, self-compassion, and the understanding that they’re not broken and their patterns once made sense. We then work on letting go of the patterns that are getting in the way of what they want now. I’m always in awe of the transformations I have witnessed.

• One person wants to stay in the relationship but the other is ambivalent about staying
• Navigating people-pleasing, self-sacrifice, and codependency
• Support for couples considering a therapeutic separation
• Discernment around having children
• Caregiving or emotionally demanding relationships
• Non-Monogamy, Polyamory, Kink

• Adult family members such as adult siblings, adult children and their parents
• Exploring how past experiences shape present patterns
• Substance use or other compulsive behaviors that affect relationships
• Life transitions and changing relationships, including college and career changes, preparing for or navigating dating, early parenting, parenting young adults, empty-nesting, midlife, and aging
• Exploring identity, sexuality, sex, intimacy, desire discrepancies

My approach is both compassionate and direct. I want you to feel understood while also having space to look honestly at the patterns that may be getting in the way of the relationships you want. I’m interested in how you and I feel in our relationship, what I’m triggering inside of you and what you are triggering inside of me. I use that to understand how you may be experiencing other relationships in your life. And I want us to feel connected enough to talk about these things when they come up.

I like to explore how your past experiences, attachment patterns, and protective strategies developed so I can understand what they’ve been trying to do for you. I also like to work in the present to find out what strategies remain effective and what are interfering with your life in this moment. Sometimes I use parts work to guide you through this. I also appreciate mindfulness strategies and will discuss them when you are stuck in the past or future.

I also attend regular personal therapy and professional consultation because I believe in the power of consistently looking at myself as a therapist and being in spaces with other therapists who can challenge me in my growth.