Lisa Mackinnon , AASW

Lisa Mackinnon is an Accredited Social Worker (AASW) based in Melbourne, Australia, with 17 years of experience supporting people through a wide range of emotional and life challenges. She brings a steady, empathetic presence to work with stress, anxiety, trauma and abuse, grief, anger and depression, and has developed focused skills for issues such as dissociation, guilt and shame, isolation and loneliness, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, self-love, and social anxiety and phobia.

Her additional qualifications in Family Therapy inform work around relationship stresses, parenting challenges, separations and caregiving, helping to address both individual concerns and the impacts those concerns have within significant relationships. Her approach is supportive and validating, shaped around each person’s unique situation and what feels right for them. She collaborates with people to identify strengths, practical solutions and pathways forward, and offers tools and techniques drawn from current understanding of how the brain and body respond to stress and trauma.

Lisa has deep experience in trauma work and aims to proceed in a careful, supported way that respects pacing and safety. She is also trained in Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), often called Tapping, a mind-body technique used to help manage emotional distress and trauma responses alongside traditional counselling. Lisa listens without judgement and supports people to move through depression, anxiety, grief and anger, to make sense of their struggles, clarify choices and reconnect with what they want from life.

Therapeutic approaches and online care with Lisa Mackinnon

Client-Centered Therapy places the person at the centre of the work, prioritising empathy, respect and collaboration. It helps when someone needs a compassionate space to explore feelings and values, and when the goal is to build self-understanding and capacity for change. Trauma-Focused Therapy concentrates on the effects of traumatic experiences and on processing those events in a way that reduces their ongoing impact. It is suited to people managing post-traumatic stress, panic, dissociation and trauma-related symptoms. Somatic Therapy attends to the body as well as the mind, offering techniques that address how stress and trauma show up physically; it can help with ground‑level regulation, panic responses and reconnecting with bodily cues.

Finding the best approach is part of the therapeutic process, and Lisa works collaboratively to choose or adapt methods based on each person’s needs, goals and preferences. This means trying approaches, checking what helps, and adjusting as required so the work fits the individual.

Online therapy offers practical flexibility - sessions by video or phone and options for live chat or text messaging make it easier to fit care into daily life and to maintain continuity when in-person meetings are difficult. Licensed professionals and therapists can use these formats to provide ongoing support, skill building and reflection in ways that suit each person’s schedule and comfort.