Maria Abada, LPC

Maria Abada is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in New Jersey with 16 years of experience in the mental health field. Her background includes work across multiple levels of care, including residential, partial care, outpatient, in-home services, and addictions settings, which has given her broad exposure to a wide range of concerns and levels of severity.

She most often supports clients navigating stress and anxiety, family and relationship conflict, major life transitions, and complex trauma or abuse. Over the past five years, she has also worked with perinatal mental health concerns, including challenges related to pregnancy and childbirth and postpartum depression. Additional areas of focus include grief, anger, self-esteem, depression, coping with life changes, post-traumatic stress, family problems, and women’s issues.

Maria’s commitment to counseling is grounded in lived experience. Having grown up close to loved ones with mental illness and having faced mental health challenges herself, she recognizes how difficult it can feel to seek support amid stigma and an overwhelming help-seeking process. She also understands the meaningful shifts that can happen when a person finds the right support and begins taking steady steps toward self-care.

Her approach is person-centered, holistic, multicultural, and integrative, beginning with where each client is and tailoring care to individual needs, cultural identities, and lifestyle factors. She incorporates evidence-based methods such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), mindfulness therapy, and motivational interviewing, and she brings a trauma-informed lens to her work while also drawing from more classical counseling traditions. Her style is warm, supportive, and collaborative, with an emphasis on clear goals and practical steps. She values steady, consistent progress rather than quick fixes. Maria is currently available to provide services only to female clients.