A depth-oriented psychotherapist and healer, helping people move from understanding to a life that actually feels different.
MA, MPA, RMHCI
Most of the people I work with are not new to therapy.
They've reflected, read, named their patterns with real precision — and found that understanding, by itself, didn't set them free. The insight was true. It just hadn't reached the place where they actually live.
My work begins there: at the threshold between knowing and becoming. Not to explain your story back to you one more time, but to help that understanding move into the body, the relationships, the ordinary hours — where change is something felt, not just grasped.
I was born in Cuba, into a lineage that carries more than one history in a single body — Southern European, North African, and Taíno; colonized and colonizer braided into the same blood. I grew up fluent in holding more than one world at once, and in being read by others in ways that rarely matched what was inside. That inheritance is not a footnote to my work. It is part of why I do it.
It taught me early what I now sit with professionally: that what happens to us settles into the body and the nervous system, that it echoes through families and generations, and that healing is rarely a matter of thinking more clearly. It is a matter of becoming whole — which is slower, and truer, and asks more of both of us.
I am a clinician, and I am a healer — and I don't experience those as separate. My training is real and ongoing: graduate study at Northwestern University, earlier academic work at Rutgers, and continuing study in trauma, contemplative psychology, and the integration of significant or non-ordinary experience. That rigor is the floor beneath everything I do.
And underneath the clinical frame is a way of seeing I'll be honest about, because the people I'm here for tend to share it: I understand consciousness as something larger than any one of us — that we are each an expression of a single, living whole. I don't bring this to you as a belief you're asked to hold. You don't need to share any of it for the work to reach you. It simply means that when you bring me an experience that doesn't fit the ordinary frame — spiritual, expansive, strange, hard to say aloud — I will meet it as real, because to me it is. I won't pathologize it, and I won't flinch.
You bring the parts of yourself that already understand. Together we work toward the part that can live differently — whole, and entirely your own.
People come to me navigating many things, though they tend to share a certain readiness — to do the deeper work rather than reach for quick relief.
Recurring relationship patterns that persist despite insight.
Burnout driven by internal pressure or a performance identity.
Identity transitions and the slow reorientation of a life.
The integration of overwhelming or expansive experiences.
Trauma that is understood but still actively felt in the body.
The particular weight of inherited, cultural, or intergenerational history.
The work I offer is depth-oriented and integrative — drawing from psychodynamic, somatic, parts-based, mindfulness-based, and trauma-informed traditions, chosen to fit you rather than the other way around. Healing happens not only through understanding our patterns, but through experiencing something different in the relationship itself: a place where old patterns can be noticed and interrupted, and something new can be practiced into being.
Northwestern University — advanced clinical study
Rutgers University — earlier foundational work
Registered Mental Health Counselor Intern, FL
License #IMH28172
Supervision: Dr. Elizabeth Mahaney, LMHC (MH10069)
Trauma research, contemplative psychology, integration of significant experiences, somatic approaches, and mindfulness-based interventions.
Independent practice in affiliation with South Tampa Therapy & Mediation — clinically grounded, individually responsive care.
Healing here is deeply integrative. I understand each person through a wide lens — biology, relationships, cultural identity, developmental history, and environment — which lets me work with the quiet, often unspoken layers beneath the surface.

Understanding how body, mind, and relationships interact. Healing happens when we address the whole.

Eriksonian — honoring your unique stage of life.

Bronfenbrenner — exploring how social and cultural systems shape well-being.

Recognizing how trauma can echo through lineage and biology.

Drawing on Brennan & Belser's published framework for spiritually integrative and non-ordinary state work.

Meeting each person through their unique biology, relationships, culture, and environment.
I tailor therapy to each person or couple, drawing from evidence-based and holistic methods.

Exploring the unconscious patterns, inner conflicts, and early relationships that shape your present.

Gottman-informed tools to support communication, repair, and trust in relationships.

Emotionally Focused Therapy to deepen safety, attunement, and secure emotional bonds.

Internal Family Systems — working with your "parts" to restore self-leadership and inner harmony.

Mindfulness and CBT-based practice to bring awareness to thought patterns and ease reactivity.

Reflection on identity, meaning, and choice — especially in times of uncertainty or transition.
Alongside my clinical practice, I am developing original integrative frameworks as part of my ongoing research. These are emerging models — works in progress, not yet part of standard clinical care — shared to reflect the direction of my scholarly work.

An original extension I am developing that builds on Brennan & Belser's EMBARK model — a flexible, multi-domain approach to the emotional, spiritual, and relational dimensions of integration. Currently a research framework, not yet in clinical use.

An evolving, liberatory framework I am authoring — honoring ancestral stories, sacred traditions, and culturally humble paths to healing. An emerging model in early development.
I offer a free fifteen-minute consultation to explore fit and next steps. Sessions are available in-person in St. Petersburg, Florida and virtually across Florida and Counseling Compact states.
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