Michelle Cortez

I'm Michelle Cortez, AMFT #146795, supervised by Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093. My clients are individuals and couples working on anxiety, trauma, and the parts of cultural identity that don't always get named clearly in therapy rooms. I ask the kind of questions that get to the heart of what's actually going on. Most clients find we land on the real issue in the first few sessions, not months in.

Much of what we do is practical. I help clients build assertiveness skills, set and hold boundaries that have been blurry for years, manage conflict without it controlling them, and communicate more clearly in the relationships that matter. These are specific skills, and they're learnable.

I also work with ADHD and neurodivergent clients, and my style tends to fit this population well. I've worked with neurodivergent clients for years. I'm direct, I'll hold you accountable to what you said you wanted, and I give homework between sessions so the change shows up in your actual life and not just in the room. For a lot of neurodivergent clients, that structure (clear feedback, concrete practice, and follow-through) is exactly what's been missing from therapy that stayed too open-ended.

I also work with clients and couples in ethical non-monogamy, alternative relationship structures, and kink, BDSM, and fetish-affirming care. The structure of your relationship, and what you do inside it sexually, isn't what I treat as the problem; my job is to help you work the patterns inside it. Sexual connection and intimacy show up in most couples I see, and I treat that as part of the relationship work, not a side specialty.

I also sit with couples at crossroads: the stay-or-go decision, separating and co-parenting well, or reorganizing a relationship without ending it. Each is a different kind of conversation, and I can sit in all three.

My approach is relational, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed. For couples, I'm informed by attachment theory and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) principles. What EFT does well: it makes the emotional pattern underneath a fight visible (the pursue-withdraw cycle, the protest-protect dance). Most couples I see don't have a communication problem. They have a pattern problem, and once they can see it, they can stop running it.

Alongside EFT-informed work, I draw from Gottman-informed concepts for relationship work, DBT for emotion regulation, ERP for anxiety and OCD patterns, and narrative therapy for clients who are inside a story they didn't write and want to revise.