A Little About Us
(and the work we really believe in)
Hello! Hola! Mari mari! Welcome.
We’re the therapists behind So(u)l Counseling. Our approach to this work grew from both lived experience and clinical training, and from recognizing how often people are taught to relate to themselves through productivity, performance, self-surveillance, or shame rather than care. Many people arrive in therapy believing something is inherently wrong with them, when so much of what they carry makes sense in the context of what they’ve lived through, what they’ve had to navigate, and what their bodies learned was necessary to survive.
Our work is grounded in the understanding that distress does not emerge in isolation. The nervous system is shaped through relationships, environments, culture, history, oppression, displacement, belonging, and the conditions people are forced to adapt to over time. We are interested in the ways people learn to protect themselves: staying hyper-independent, emotionally guarded, constantly useful, disconnected from the body, responsible for everyone else, or endlessly striving to become more acceptable to the world around them. Rather than treating these responses as pathology to erase, we approach them with curiosity, respect, and care for the intelligence they once carried.
As clinicians, our backgrounds include training in somatic psychotherapy, expressive and movement-based therapies, trauma-informed care, and relational approaches to mental health. At the same time, we understand this work as much larger than any one discipline or institution. The perspectives that shape us emerge through generations of cultural knowledge, artistic expression, community care, storytelling, resistance, and embodied ways of surviving and making meaning that have existed long before clinical language attempted to define them.
More than anything, we hope this practice feels like a space where people do not have to fragment themselves in order to be understood. A space where complexity is allowed, where the body is listened to rather than controlled, and where healing is not measured by how well someone performs normalcy, but by their growing capacity for connection, presence, agency, and aliveness.