I am a clinician, Motivational Interviewing trainer, consultant, and educator with more than fifteen years of experience working with people navigating trauma, change, relationships, and uncertainty.
I earned my Master’s degree in Social Work from UC Berkeley and completed post-graduate clinical training at the UCSF Child Trauma Research Center, where my early work focused on trauma, attachment, and the impact of adversity on children and families. My clinical work has since expanded across the lifespan and across settings, including complex trauma, behavioral health, justice-impacted populations, and criminal defense and civil rights contexts.
I was born into a Bolivian family where meaning often lived in story, humor, memory, metaphor, silence, family history, and what was understood without being directly said. That way of listening continues to shape my work today and has contributed to my particular interest in culture, story, metaphor, and meaning-making within Motivational Interviewing.
MI gave language and structure to many of the principles I had already come to value in clinical practice: curiosity, collaboration, respect for autonomy, careful listening, and the understanding that ambivalence often contains important information. I am especially interested in what happens when MI is brought into conversation with trauma, attachment, ethics, culture, metaphor, values, and meaning-making.
My trainings are experiential, relational, and clinically grounded. I combine practical skill-building with storytelling, reflective practice, real-play, metaphor, and deidentified clinical vignettes. My goal is for participants to leave with skills they can use immediately, while also thinking more deeply about autonomy, ambivalence, culture, relationship, and their own role in conversations about change.
Alongside training and consultation, I maintain a small psychotherapy practice focused on adults healing from complex trauma, relational trauma, and difficult early experiences. I provide training, consultation, and clinical services in both English and Spanish.
Capacitación, consulta y servicios clínicos disponibles en inglés y español.
I teach Motivational Interviewing as a relational practice shaped by culture, context, and the ethics of influence — with close attention to autonomy, ambivalence, and the meanings people bring to change.
My goal is to help participants understand the spirit beneath the skills: how partnership, acceptance, compassion, and empowerment shape the way we listen, respond, and engage in conversations about change.
My trainings are experiential, collaborative, and clinically grounded. I use real-play, storytelling, metaphor, reflective practice, and deidentified clinical vignettes to help participants move from understanding MI conceptually to using it with greater confidence and intentionality.
I am particularly interested in how culture, identity, trauma, attachment, values, story, and meaning-making shape motivation and ambivalence. I encourage participants to stay curious about the worlds clients inhabit, the meanings they bring to change, and the assumptions we may bring into the conversation ourselves.
No two trainings are exactly the same. I bring a clear structure and learning goals, while also making room for the material to come alive through the questions, experiences, practice settings, and clinical dilemmas participants bring into the room. The core principles remain consistent, but the examples, discussion, practice, and areas of emphasis often move in the directions that are most relevant to the people who are actually there.
That responsiveness is part of how I try to teach MI itself: collaboratively, with curiosity, and with respect for what participants already know and bring with them.
I want learners to leave with practical skills they can use immediately, and with a deeper way of listening — greater curiosity about what a person is protecting, what matters to them, what their ambivalence may be communicating, and what becomes possible when autonomy is genuinely respected.
I offer trainings in English and Spanish and welcome participants from a wide range of helping professions and levels of MI experience.
