Welcome!

Many of the experiences people bring into therapy make more sense than they’ve been told. The anxiety, the relational patterns, the ways a person has learned to disappear or perform or hold it all together are not evidence of something gone wrong. They are evidence of what it took to survive. I am a psychotherapist interested in understanding those strategies with you, by not rushing past them, because I believe that coherence does not always feel safe. Rather, people who have learned to live in contradiction often know something deeper about what it means to be alive.

My Therapeutic Focus:

I bring particular experience with complex trauma, personality disorders, dissociation, and the relational lives of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities, immigrants, survivors of intimate partner violence and narcissistic abuse, and those affected by academic and institutional harm. In my practice with individuals, couples, and polycules, I pay close attention to what unfolds between us in the room, to patterns of trust and mistrust, moments of connection and rupture, because these dynamics often carry the most important information about how one shows up in the world and how they’ve learned to survive it.

My Approach to Therapy:

As a trans of color therapist, I value the traditions of psychoanalysis, psychodynamic theory, and relational-cultural theory that urge us to take seriously how our past organizes our present, how relationships shape who we become, and how the broader conditions of a person’s life enter the room whether we name them or not. Sessions with me tend to move between tenderness and directness, humor and gravity, and a willingness to slow down at the places most people speed through. I don’t rush toward resolution, and I don’t ask people to hold themselves together in ways that cost them their complexity. However you arrive, and whatever you bring, I am interested in what it means and where it comes from.

My Philosophy on Therapy:

Sometimes people come to therapy sensing that something deeper is organizing their distress, even if they don’t yet have language for it. We may spend our time together finding that language, sitting with what has gone unnamed, and discovering what shifts when the patterns that once protected you are finally understood rather than simply managed. I believe that good therapy does not ask you to become more coherent, more manageable, or more legible to the systems that may have harmed you. It asks what becomes possible when someone is finally met with presence, honesty, and a refusal to look away.

Experience: 

As a scholar-clinician, I also serve as an expert witness in federal asylum cases for LGBTQ+ immigrants and provide consultation and training on gender, sexuality, and trauma-informed practice for clinicians, legal professionals, and organizations. I also teach graduate courses at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work on structural social work, sexuality across the life cycle, research methods, and Mexican Chicago. I have also published extensively on race, gender, power, and the cultural politics of sex. My first book, Bottoms Up: Queer Mexicanness and Latinx Performance (NYU Press, 2024), is a transdisciplinary study of queer embodiment, sexual politics, and what it means to build a life from positions of exposure.

More About Me:

Transgender woman of color · Mexican-American and Chicana · California Central Valley native, the homeland of the Yokuts and Miwuk peoples · First-generation high school graduate · Trauma survivor