Home / Meet the Therapists / Mackenzie Pereira
Mackenzie Pereira,
LCMHC-A
Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate. ADHD, body image and self-esteem, and anxiety in teens 16 and up, and adults.
You don’t have to feel good enough at school, at work, or in the mirror, before you come.
ADHD
Body image and self-esteem
Anxiety, panic and OCD
LGBTQ+ affirming
Teens 16 and up
Availability changes week to week. Email Mackenzie directly to check current openings, or call or text her at 910-518-9528.
Not good enough is the thought running underneath most of it. Not good enough at work, not on top of things the way other people seem to be, not right in the mirror.
These thoughts are usually learned somewhere rather than earned. Most of the work is on what it costs you to keep believing them.
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Mackenzie Pereira is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate at Allora Rise Counseling and Therapy, seeing teens 16 and up and young adults at the practice’s Cargo District office in Wilmington and by telehealth throughout North Carolina. She works mostly with young adults navigating life after college and trying to figure it all out, and with women carrying a persistent sense of falling short of what they should be. Anxiety is usually the word they arrive with, and it’s usually not the whole story. Parents of teenage clients tend to reach out because their kid is buckling under school pressure.
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She works most often with three things.
ADHD
If you have spent years being told you’re lazy or careless, Mackenzie has the diagnosis herself and is direct about it, teaching skills, normalizing the difficulty, and taking the shame and the need for perfection out of it. With teenage clients she does that education with the parents too, so the household understands what it’s actually dealing with.
Body image and self-esteem
Particularly if you don’t feel good enough about how you look. Mackenzie works on where that belief actually came from, and it usually arrives tangled up with eating habits and with weight that has gone up or down.
Anxiety, panic, and OCD
Panic attacks, social anxiety, or the high-functioning kind where you look like you have it together and are running on perfectionism. Her aim is to normalize the thoughts and the feelings that come with them, so they stop being frightening, and to teach you enough about how your own thinking works to manage it.
Beyond those three, Mackenzie also works with burnout and work-life balance, insomnia and sleep difficulties including the kind that comes with ADHD, emotional regulation, relational trauma and toxic relationship patterns, attachment concerns, identity exploration, LGBTQ+ identity, and chronic illness and hormonal health.
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Outside what she treats, Mackenzie has depth with three communities: the LGBTQ+ community; educators and school staff, as a former school counselor; and high-achieving students, who have made up a large share of her caseload.
Clients would describe Mackenzie as very human.
She shows up in the therapy room the way she shows up everywhere else, and she’s funny, with a gentle nudge available when one is needed. She ends most sessions with something to think about, practice, or reflect on, which might be a worksheet or a journal prompt or just a question.
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She’s trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), motivational interviewing, and person-centered work, with framework training in exposure and response prevention (ERP). Most of her work is a combination of ACT, CBT, and DBT, with ERP frameworks for clients dealing with panic and OCD.​​
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Outside the office she practices yoga, and she is a 200-hour Certified Yoga Teacher.
Your first session
Whether Mackenzie is your fit
Mackenzie starts by setting expectations, including that you can expect to do some work outside the room, and explaining how she works. Then confidentiality and informed consent, and a real chance to ask questions before any information gathering starts. She will tell you outright that this first appointment feels more formal than the ones after it. Afterward she builds a treatment plan from what you discussed and reviews it with you next time. With teenage clients, a parent joins for the first fifteen minutes or so, and the teen completes consent paperwork too, because she needs to know the young person is bought in.
Mackenzie works one-to-one with teens 16 and up and young adults. Her practice focuses on ADHD, body image and self-esteem, and anxiety, panic, and OCD. The work is collaborative: she’s one half of the team but needs you working too. Her style is informal. She keeps things conversational, and adds structure when it helps you.
If that sounds like what you're looking for, a free fifteen-minute consultation with Mackenzie is the fastest way to know. If you’re carrying something else, email info@allorarise.com or call or text 910-408-2302, and we’ll point you to the therapist here who works with it.
PRACTICAL DETAILS
INSURANCE
Aetna
Blue Cross Blue Shield NC
SELF-PAY
Private pay accepted
Sliding scale available
Superbill provided on request for out-of-network
SEES
Individuals
Teens 16 and up and adults
WHERE
2202 Wrightsville Ave
Suite 111
Wilmington, NC 28403
Telehealth throughout North Carolina