Approach

Warm, collaborative, evidence-based.

Therapy at this practice integrates three of the most well-supported approaches in mental health, sequenced to where you are, not where a protocol expects you to be.

CBT

Cognitive-behavioral therapy, practical tools for the patterns that keep tightening their grip. Used for anxiety, depression, and stuck thinking.

EMDR

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, an evidence-based therapy for trauma and stuck memories. Maria is EMDR-certified.

Mindfulness

Body-based skills for steadiness, regulation, and presence, integrated throughout the work, not as a separate add-on.

What it's like

A typical arc of the work.

Choosing the method

Chosen for the person, not applied as a formula.

Maria does not decide on a method before she has met you. She listens first for what is actually driving the problem, and the method follows from that. When the trouble lives mostly in present-day thinking and behavior, a worry loop that spins every night, an avoidance that has quietly shrunk your week, a conclusion about yourself you have stopped questioning, cognitive-behavioral work is usually where she starts, because it gives you something to do with the pattern rather than only a name for it.

When the present keeps snagging on something older, EMDR becomes the better tool. The tell is a reaction that is out of proportion to what just happened: a tone of voice that floods you, a place you cannot drive past, a memory the body still treats as current. EMDR is for the material that talking about has not settled.

Mindfulness-based work is rarely the whole plan and almost always part of it. Before anything difficult is touched, you need a reliable way to come back down, attention to breath, to the body, to what is actually in the room. That is the stabilization step, and skipping it is how therapy becomes overwhelming instead of useful.

Most people are somewhere in the middle, and the work moves between the three across months rather than picking one and staying there. Maria will tell you which one you are in and why, in plain language. You should never be in a session without knowing what you are doing or what it is for.

The first session

Something concrete to try.

The first hour is not an interrogation and it is not a form. Maria will ask what brought you now rather than a year ago, what you have already tried, and what you want to be different. If you come as a couple, both people get real, uninterrupted time to describe the problem as they see it, she will not let one version of the story become the official one.

Toward the end she tells you how she reads it and what she would suggest working on first. Most people leave those early sessions with something concrete to try before the next one: a way to interrupt the 2 a.m. spiral, a specific sentence to use when a conversation starts to tip, a boundary to test with one person. Insight matters, but something changing in the week between sessions is what tells you the work is moving.

She is also direct about fit. Thirty years in, she knows the cases she is genuinely good at and the ones better served by a psychiatrist, an eating-disorder specialist, a substance-use program, or a colleague with a different focus. If you are one of those, she will say so early and point you somewhere real rather than keep the hour. No therapist can promise how a marriage will turn out, and she will not pretend otherwise what she can tell you is whether she thinks this work is worth starting.

Sessions run in person at the Weston office or by secure video anywhere in Florida, fully in English or fully in Spanish. Whichever language you think and argue and cry in is the one the work should happen in.