Long before I became a therapist, I was trying to understand suffering—including my own.
I’ve often looked at the life I have now and thought, I wasn’t supposed to live this life. Not because I don’t believe I deserve it, but because the life I’ve built is so different from what my earliest experiences taught me to expect.
That difference has made me deeply curious about how we can be shaped by what happens to us without having to be defined by it.
I’m curious about why some experiences stay with us, why we repeat patterns even when we know they hurt, and why intellectual understanding doesn’t always translate into living differently. Most of all, I want to understand what allows us to change.
That curiosity has taken me into psychology and therapy, years of mindfulness and meditation practice, the mind-body connection, work within substance use and behavioral addiction treatment, and the many ways human beings have experienced suffering and healing.
It has also shaped the way I understand my role as a therapist.
I don’t believe my job is to tell you who you are or what your life should look like. I believe my job is to get curious alongside you—to help you understand what has shaped you, notice what your mind and body are communicating, question what no longer feels true, and make more intentional choices about what you want to carry forward.
There is so much we inherit, absorb, learn, and adapt to without ever consciously choosing it.
And there is so much we can unlearn.
What shapes my work
Over the past decade, my work as a therapist has brought me alongside people navigating anxiety, trauma, addiction, chronic pain, difficult relationships, major life transitions, and the complicated experience of being human.
My work is systems-informed. I don’t believe our pain—or our healing—can always be understood outside of the cultures, communities, identities, and systems we live within. As a Chicana therapist, I’m especially mindful of the ways culture, identity, power, and systemic oppression can shape how we understand ourselves, what we learn to carry, and what healing is allowed to look like.
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
— FANNIE LOU HAMER
Early in my career, I worked in both inpatient and outpatient substance use and behavioral addiction treatment. Later, my work with chronic pain—and my training in Pain Reprocessing Therapy—deepened my understanding of the relationship between the brain, body, emotion, and our lived experiences.
But my relationship with the mind-body connection began long before it entered my clinical work.
I’ve practiced meditation and mindfulness for many years, including completing three 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreats. During graduate school, where I specialized in Spirituality and Depth Psychology, I also had the opportunity to study the intersection of contemplative traditions, psychology, culture, and mental health internationally.
In Kyoto, Japan, I lived at a Zen Buddhist temple while studying Japanese approaches to mindfulness and mental health and practicing Zen meditation. In Toulouse, France, I studied the integration of Tibetan Buddhism and Western psychology while living and practicing within a Tibetan Buddhist spiritual and educational community. These experiences deepened not only my relationship with meditation, but my understanding that there is no single cultural framework for understanding the mind, suffering, or healing.
I draw from psychodynamic and relational therapy, cognitive behavioral approaches, mindfulness, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, and somatically informed practices. I don’t use all of these approaches with every person, and I don’t believe healing requires you to subscribe to any particular philosophy or practice.
The goal isn’t to fit you into my way of understanding the world.
It’s to understand yours.
What you can expect from me
I bring warmth and compassion to this work, but I also bring honesty and directness.
I’ll listen closely, ask questions, notice patterns, and offer reflections that may invite you to see something differently. I may challenge you at times, but never from the assumption that I know you better than you know yourself.
I want our work to be a place where you can be honest about what is difficult, curious about what you don’t yet understand, and increasingly willing to trust your own experience.
You don’t need to perform insight here. You don’t need to have the right answer.