A Latino therapist, not a Latino specialty.
I'm Latino. That's not a technique I trained in — it's the family I grew up listening to.
What I actually bring to this.
There's a specific kind of tired that comes from being the translator in your own family — for your parents at the doctor's office, for your grandparents at the bank, for the cousin who calls at 11pm. There's a specific kind of guilt that comes from doing better than the generation that made your life possible. There's a specific kind of loneliness in being second-generation, or 1.5, or the one who left.
I don't treat any of that as a footnote. It's often the exact material. What happened in your family, what didn't get said, what your parents survived and never named, what "estar bien" was allowed to mean in your house — that's part of the work when it's relevant, not a diversity module I bolted on.
I'm Columbia-trained. I'm licensed in California. And I'm not going to ask you to explain why your mom's tone about your career "isn't really that bad" — I already know why.
You might recognize —
- You're the first in your family to be in therapy, and it feels vaguely disloyal
- You carry your family's expectations in your chest, not just your head
- You've achieved what they wanted for you and can't tell them how tired you are
- You feel guilty for having problems your parents would have loved to have
- Your Spanish and English each carry parts of you the other one can't
- You've had therapists before who needed you to explain your own culture to them
Questions people actually ask.
Do you only work with Latino clients?
No. But it's a large and specific part of my practice, and it's where a lot of the cultural nuance gets to be assumed rather than explained.
Can we switch between English and Spanish?
Yes. Many of my clients move between both depending on the topic. We work in whichever language is closer to what you're actually feeling in that moment.
I'm second-generation and my Spanish isn't perfect. Does that matter?
Not at all. The point isn't fluency — it's not having to translate the parts of your life that don't have an English word.