My Approach
Most people arrive wanting the anxiety to stop. That is a reasonable place to begin, and it is where we begin. But relief that lasts usually comes from two directions at once: something practical you can use this week, and a slower look at what has been driving the pattern for years.
I have been doing this work for 17 years, and the thing I have become most sure of is that therapy has to be useful before it can be deep. If you are lying awake at two in the morning running the same loop, you do not need an interpretation. You need a way to interrupt the loop. So the first sessions are practical. We look at what your anxiety actually does in your body, when it shows up, and what makes it worse. Then we build a small set of things you can reach for that are specific to you, not a printout.
Once your week has some room in it, the work usually opens up on its own. Clients start noticing the pattern rather than just the symptom: that the panic before a presentation is not about the presentation, that the fight you keep having with your partner is the same fight you had with a parent, that the reason you cannot rest is that rest has never felt safe. That is when the deeper work becomes possible, and it is the part that tends to hold.
I am direct. I will ask questions you have been avoiding, and I will tell you when I think you are talking yourself out of something. I am also not neutral about you: I am on your side, and I say so. Sessions are collaborative, which means you can tell me a direction is not working and we will change it. You do not have to be a good client. You just have to show up and be reasonably honest about what is going on.
Culture matters in this room. I was born in Mexico City and I am bilingual in English and Spanish, and I work with a lot of clients who are carrying more than one set of expectations at the same time. Family obligation, immigration history, being the first person in a family to do a certain kind of job: these are not side notes to your anxiety. They are often the shape of it.
What I do not do is promise outcomes. Therapy is not a product with a delivery date, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What I can tell you is what the work looks like, what I am trained in, and how we will know together whether it is helping.
What I Am Trained In
I am not loyal to a single model. These are the approaches I have training and experience in, and the reason I reach for each one.
We look at the thoughts that run underneath the anxious feeling and test them against what is actually true. CBT gives you something concrete to do in the moment your chest tightens before a meeting, and over time it changes the story you tell yourself about your own capability.
When emotion arrives faster than thought, skills come first. We borrow the distress tolerance and emotion regulation pieces of DBT so you have a way to bring your body down from a spike without white-knuckling through it or numbing out afterward.
Some memories do not respond to talking about them because they were never filed away properly. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation to help the nervous system finish processing an experience, so it stops arriving in the present as though it were still happening.
For couples, I use Gottman structure to slow down the arguments that always end the same way. We map the cycle, learn what repair actually sounds like, and build the small daily habits that hold a relationship together between the big conversations.
Underneath most recurring fights is a bid for reassurance that never quite lands. EFIT Level 1 helps both partners hear the attachment need under the criticism or the silence, and practice responding to it directly.
Not the version that asks you to empty your mind. Practical attention training: noticing where you are, what your body is doing, and how to come back when you have been three hours ahead of yourself all afternoon.
How you learned to be close to people, and what it cost you, shapes how you handle stress now. We trace those patterns without blaming anyone, and look at where they still make sense and where they are running on old information.
The Methods
Every method has its own page: what it is in plain language, what a session involves, and who it is not for.
For people who can already argue against their own anxious thoughts and still lose. We use CBT as something you practice, not something you understand.
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Noticing what you do without immediately grading yourself for it. The stance underneath everything else I use.
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Skills-informed individual therapy, not a full DBT program. For the 2am spike and the conversation you keep putting off.
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Parts language for people at war with themselves. IFS-informed work, often alongside EMDR.
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Research-based couples work with structure: assessment first, then the cycle, then repair. Gottman Level 1 trained.
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Attachment-based work on the cycle underneath the argument. EFIT Level 1 trained, for couples and for individuals.
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The through-line of my whole practice: anxiety, trauma, dating and couples all sit on top of it. Slower by design.
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For memories that talking about has not touched. EMDR has its own page, because for many people it is the reason they came looking in the first place.
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Skills first, almost always. If you cannot get through a Tuesday, exploring your childhood will not help yet. Once your week feels manageable, we can look at where the pattern started.
By what is in front of us. I am trained in several approaches so I can match the work to you rather than fit you to one model. We talk openly about what is working and change course when something is not.
It depends on what you are bringing and how long it has been there. I do not make any guarantees about timelines or outcomes. What I will do is check in with you regularly about whether the work is going somewhere.
No. Some people find it useful and some do not need to. You set the pace and the subject matter, every session.
Free 15-Minute Consult
The free 15-minute consult is a short, no-pressure call to hear what is going on and decide together, gently, whether working with me is the right fit.
In person in San Diego, and by telehealth across California.
