Growing up as a Mexican American moving between London, Mexico City, and suburban Cincinnati, I quickly learned how creatively we adapt to our environments. No matter how hard I tried to fit a simple narrative, it never worked — I carried many identities, and people always wanted to pin me down to just one. Even a question as simple as "Where are you from?" would spark a cascade of follow-ups, never quite giving the neat story others expected.
That experience of living at the edges of categories — of never quite fitting the frame — is still at the center of how I think about people.
Hi, I’m Luisa
My approach to therapy
Honest presence.
Genuine curiosity.
Full attention.
Before becoming a therapist, I spent 12 years as a product designer in Mexico City and Silicon Valley. I learned to listen for what's actually being asked underneath what's being said, and to care about how an experience feels to the person having it. Those instincts didn't leave me.
I trained at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I earned my master's in clinical psychology. My approach draws on talk therapy, mindfulness, and somatic practices — I'm particularly interested in the connection between what we carry in our bodies and what we carry in our stories.
The territory I find most alive in this work: loss and what it reshapes, identity and who we become after something breaks us open, love and the particular difficulty of staying honest inside it, and the major transitions that ask us to figure out who we are now.
I bring myself into the room — my perspective, my honest reactions, my full attention. I've found that's what this work asks for.
Outside of work I practice Vipassana meditation, read probably too much, and walk the Oakland Hills with my dog.