Culturally Sensitive Therapy

A culturally sensitive therapist is one who is intentionally and mindfully curious about all ways of being human and all ways of healing. For the therapist, this takes work and deep listening, a willingness to be moved, disturbed, and humbled. Cultural sensitivity is understanding that there are experiences and feelings that you can never fully know or understand because you will never experience these things yourself (humility). It means staying vigilant for signs of implicit bias within.

One size does NOT fit all in therapy and culture plays a HUGE role in that. With each therapy intervention that we collaboratively work on, your culture and values are at the forefront and will be honored in our therapeutic relationship.

To paraphrase Ignacio Martin-Boro, for psychology to be truly emancipatory it must first sever itself from its own idealogical chains, from psychology itself. Dominant psychologies implicitly serve the status quo by defining health as adjustment to white, middle class, heteronormative, colonialist social norms. I aim to support you in reconnecting to your own cultural-historical-ancestral sources of health, healing, & resilience towards a deep integration of heart, body, spirit, story, & culture

I believe strongly that our culture(s) play a huge role in our happiness as well as our dysfunction. I take social, cultural, family, and systems level factors into account when working with clients and believe that healing our relationships to our cultures is a major part of overall mental health.

I am a queer, feminist therapist and coming from a systems background, believe that the environments and systems we are surviving within impact our sense of safety and our sense of self. I work hard to deconstruct and unpack the ways our shitty cultural norms negatively impact my clients and connect them back to an internalized sense of self-worth, self-esteem, self-validation, and safety.

As a multicultural person, providing a space that is not only trauma-informed, but culturally sensitive is vital to me as a mental health professional. I believe therapy not only should be culturally-sensitive, but creative in the ways we reach clients to make therapy accessible, meaningful, and impactful. By providing this space, I keep in mind I am not an expert on everyone's culture, while not expecting those to educate me so that they feel comfortable.

I use a systemic approach in order to look at the different life stressors that our society, environments, family, and educational systems have created and imposed upon us through time.

I respect your beliefs, experiences and values in regards to our treatment and the life you want to live.

Identifying as BIPOC, AADPI, and/or Latine is a huge part of your life. We all wear our races on our faces. Understanding how your race, ethnicity, and culture effect your life is an inherent part of my role as your counselor. Together, we can explore what parts of your cultural identity feel like external expectations placed on you (like your parent's influences or stereotypes) and what parts create who you are as an individual. Going through my own cultural journey has taught me a lot!

I think this is a key foundation to any therapy.

My training as a counseling psychologist is steeped in a holistic view of humanity: strengths-based, developmental, contextual, multiculturally-sensitive with a focus on social justice. I have taught many courses on on CST, but more importantly, I continue to engage in a personal ongoing practice of cultural self-exploration, including awareness of the privilege I hold. CST means that we can explore all aspects of your identity and the ways they influence and contextualize your experiences.

Many of the clients who see me experience identity issues or trauma symptoms related to racially based or intergenerational traumas. My professional training and experience as an activist and advocate spanning decades underlies much of my focus on racial and social justice. I'm particularly attuned to issues of "difference" among those whose experiences do not reflect dominant thinking regardless of whether that experience reflects marginalization: Mixed-race, interracial and multicultural.

I received a great graduate and post graduate education where culturally sensitive therapy was emphasized and in addition through additional training annual training.

I use a culturally sensitive lens to allow clients to be the experts in their own lives, as coming from a place of non-judgement and understanding.

As a bicultural/bilingual therapist, I am attuned to the profound impact of my clients‘ cultural background on their communication.

I keep a close eye on what role the environments you have inhabited may have played on your current views about yourself, others, and the world at large, and I constantly invite you to do the same. It can be very empowering to realize how you came to embrace your beliefs, and with that information, be able to decide which of them you want to keep or reject.

To paraphrase Ignacio Martin-Boro, for psychology to be truly emancipatory it must first sever itself from its own idealogical chains, from psychology itself. Dominant psychologies implicitly serve the status quo by defining health as adjustment to white, middle class, heteronormative, colonialist social norms, without interrogating the structural and systemic forms of oppression embedded in those norms. I aim to support you in a deep integration of heart, body, spirit, story, & culture.