Home / Meet the Therapists / Margaret Kotz
Margaret Kotz,
LCMHC-A
Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate. OCD, grief, and life transitions in adults 18 and older.
For people holding a lot together, with a thought or a loss they can’t put down.
OCD
Exposure and response prevention
Grief
Life Transitions
Perinatal and postpartum
Currently accepting new clients. Book online, email Margaret at margaret@allorarise.com, or call or text her at 910-375-1886.
The thought is about something you would never do, and it arrives anyway. So you check the lock again, or wash again, or ask someone to tell you it’s fine, and the relief lasts about an hour before it starts over. Or someone died, and the world expects you to be further along than you are. Either way there’s a household to run, or a classroom, or a night spent waiting up for someone whose shift should have ended by now, and no room in any of it for this.
Doing all of it adequately and being quietly worn out is a real reason to come in. It doesn’t have to get worse than that.
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A ritual that started as relief and turned into the schedule is a recognizable pattern, and there’s specific treatment for it.
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Margaret Kotz is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate at Allora Rise Counseling and Therapy, seeing adults 18 and older at the practice’s Cargo District office in Wilmington and by telehealth throughout North Carolina. Her clients are most often mothers, partners and family members of first responders, and educators. What they have in common is emotional exhaustion from balancing multiple roles and the volume of what is being asked of them.
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She works most often with three things.
OCD
The thought arrives, you do the thing that quiets it, and the quiet gets shorter each time. Margaret is trained in exposure and response prevention (ERP), the treatment with the strongest evidence base for OCD, and the work is approaching what sets the thought off, in planned steps, without the ritual that usually follows, until the compulsion stops being fed.
Grief
Most often you have lost a parent, or you’re grieving ahead of time because of a diagnosis. In her sessions it shows up as crying, or silence, or anger, or talking very fast, and none of those is the wrong one.
Life transitions
If you’re newly a mother, or in the early years of it, that’s where Margaret has the most depth. She also works with perinatal and postpartum concerns and with parenting.
Beyond those three, Margaret also works with anxiety, particularly high-functioning anxiety, perfectionism, and health anxiety, alongside burnout and work-life balance, and relational trauma and toxic relationship patterns. She also incorporates faith into the work for clients who ask for it.
Clients describe Margaret as direct but gentle, with humor where it fits.
She asks what you want from homework rather than deciding for you, offers a choice between approaches rather than assigning one, and tailors sessions to what you actually need that week.
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She’s also trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), motivational interviewing, and person-centered work. She uses CBT for anxiety, depression, and OCD, ERP specifically for OCD, and mindfulness throughout. With anxiety she starts by identifying what sets it off and putting grounding techniques in place. Those clients have usually been in therapy before, stopped when they felt able to manage on their own, and called again when pushing through stopped working.
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On grief, Margaret is direct about what counseling can and can’t do. People often expect it to fix grief, and grief doesn’t get fixed. What changes is your relationship to it. She has a few metaphors for it, glitter being one, and she’s honest that it will still arrive out of nowhere years later. As she puts it, the only way out is through, and while there’s no out, it does get lighter.
Your first session
Margaret starts with an introduction, so you know something about the person you’re about to work with, then covers informed consent and confidentiality properly rather than as paperwork. She asks whether you have questions, or anything she should know before you start, and then works through the intake assessment, keeping it as comfortable as an intake can be
Whether Margaret is your fit
Margaret works one-to-one with adults 18 and older. Her practice is built around OCD, grief, and life transitions.
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If that is what brought you here, a free fifteen-minute consultation with Margaret 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
SEES
Individuals
Adults 18 and older
WHERE
2202 Wrightsville Ave
Suite 111
Wilmington, NC 28403
Telehealth throughout North Carolina