Pre-Doctoral Intern
Supervised by Dr. Jen Casper, PsyD
Video Sessions
Hello, I’m a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. I offer a welcoming approach to therapy built on trust and dedication to change. I devote myself to building your capacities to overcome life’s challenges, recognizing that we are, at times, the source of our own distress.
I believe that overwhelming experiences can cut us off from our sense of self, trapping us in the past or fantasies of the future. I create space for these life events to be held, metabolized, and gradually made meaningful. When it is called for, I draw on embodied practices as well as cognitive and emotional reframing. I approach every session as an act of accompaniment: creating the conditions for you to encounter yourself in new ways and to imagine what is possible.
As the son of a Mexican mother and an Irish-American father, I grew up in California threading personal and cultural borderlands. My early experience of in-betweenness now shapes how I listen: I’m attuned to questions of belonging, race, loss, gender expression, sexual orientation, family dynamics, and spiritual emergence. In order to live more fully and freely in the present, I believe we must free ourselves from our own patterns as well as those that may have been passed onto us.
My clinical approach is relational, psychodynamic, and depth-oriented, informed by attachment and trauma theory. My training has given me the opportunity to work with various San Francisco Latine communities, including adults experiencing PTSD, elementary school children navigating systemic pressures, HIV-positive adults adapting to aging and loss, and families integrating migration trauma.
I believe individual and collective wounding is embedded within histories of cultural erasure and intergenerational trauma, and I engage in decolonizing my work both within the field of mental health and in community. I am drawn to the healing potential of altered states of consciousness and hold a certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and Research from CIIS, where my training has spanned contemporary clinical research alongside cultural and traditional frameworks for working with expanded states.
Prior to my training as a clinical psychologist, I spent nearly two decades as an editor for documentary film/video, where I believe I learned that every person’s story deserves careful, patient attention. Outside the therapy room, I engage with ancestral ceremonial practices led by local elders. I live in the East Bay where I am a devoted husband and father.