Meet Maria
Committed to helping couples build communication skills, rebuild trust, and reconnect emotionally.
Most people arrive here after reading a page about couples counseling or anxiety and wanting to know one thing: who is this person, and will she understand me.
Maria Van Thienen has been a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist for thirty years. She practices in Weston, Florida, and by video across the state. She is certified in EMDR, and she works in English and Spanish.
Why people choose her
When faith matters, and when it does not.
Clients tell her, often in the first session, that they chose her because she is a Christian. It comes up when a couple is deciding whether a marriage can be repaired, and it comes up when somebody is carrying something they have never said out loud to anyone.
Maria is Catholic. She is a therapist, not a member of the clergy, and she does not offer spiritual direction or use faith as a treatment plan. What her faith means in practice is that when a client describes their marriage as a promise made before God, or says they have been praying about a decision for a year, that is met as something real rather than as material to be reframed.
Clients who hold no faith at all are equally welcome, and a great many of them come.
Thirty years, and what that changes
Recognizing faster, not caring less.
Thirty years does not make a therapist better at caring. It makes her faster at recognizing.
She has sat with enough couples to know within a session or two which argument is the real one and which is the decoy. She has worked with enough trauma to know when to slow down and when a client is ready to go somewhere difficult. Mostly it means she is hard to shock, which matters more than people expect. Clients spend a lot of energy managing how their therapist might react, and with Maria that turns out to be unnecessary.
Who she works with
Couples, individuals, parents, and families.
Couples come to reconnect, to stop the same fight from ending every week the same way, and sometimes to decide whether to continue at all. Adults come with anxiety, depression, grief and trauma. She also works with teens and children, and with parents who are trying to help a child they do not know how to reach.
Sessions are available in English and in Spanish. For bilingual families in Broward County this matters in a specific way: the difficult sentence is often only available in one language, and having to translate it costs something. Here it does not have to be translated.
How she works
Warm, direct, and practical.
She is not a therapist who nods for fifty minutes.
Her training is clinical: cognitive behavioral work, EMDR for trauma, mindfulness-based approaches for anxiety and regulation. Which of those she uses depends entirely on the person in front of her. Most clients leave the first few sessions with something concrete to try, because insight that never reaches Tuesday morning is not much use.
She is also honest about scope. If she is not the right therapist for what you are carrying, she will say so and help you find someone who is.
Practical details
In person, by video, or in Spanish.
Maria's office is in Weston, Florida at 2645 Executive Park Drive, Weston, FL 33331. Sessions are available in person there and by secure telehealth anywhere in Florida.
Self-pay sessions are $250. Superbills are available for out-of-network reimbursement. Florida license LMFT MT3115. EMDR-certified. In practice since 1993.