Background & Experience
Thirty years of practice across cultures, languages, and generations.
I've been a licensed clinical psychologist for thirty years, and very little of what I know came from a single training or a straight path.
Personal roots
Some of it is personal. I immigrated from Venezuela and moved to Chicago for graduate school, which gave me an early, firsthand understanding of what it means to rebuild a sense of home and identity in an unfamiliar place — an experience that later shaped my dissertation on multicultural parenting, and has stayed with me in my work with immigrant and expatriate families ever since.
Early career & Tokyo
Early in my career, I worked at a counseling center with young adults working on their independence, later at a counseling center in Tokyo, seeing clients from more than ten countries. I supported the international and expatriate community there and built workshops specifically for mobile families finding their footing somewhere new. It was also in Tokyo that I first started teaching, at Temple University's Japan campus.
Teaching & family systems
When I returned to the U.S. in 2009, I continued teaching for ten years — this time at Nova Southeastern University, where I taught the graduate family systems course. Family systems has stayed close to the center of how I think about people ever since: the idea that we don't struggle in isolation, we struggle in the context of the relationships and generations around us, and that's often where the most lasting change happens too.
Couples, families & beyond
I'm one of a relatively small number of clinical psychologists with a specific, deep specialization in couples and family work — including advanced Gottman Method training — alongside individual therapy across ages and life stages. I've also spent years working with teenagers, both clinically and through volunteer work, and there's a particular kind of satisfaction in walking alongside a motivated teenager as they grow into an adult.
I have thirty years of continuous, hands-on learning — across cultures, languages, generations, and disciplines — and the ability to bring all of it into the room with the person actually in front of me. Many of the colleagues who refer clients to me tell me they're looking for exactly that: a wise, integrative perspective they can trust with complexity.