Maritza Alvarez-Pena, LMFT
Compassionate therapist combining body and talk therapies
About Maritza
Maritza Alvarez-Pena is a bilingual licensed marriage and family therapist based in California. She speaks English and Spanish and brings 23 years of clinical experience to conversations about stress, anxiety, grief, parenting worries, trauma, and depression. Maritza aims to make the first step feel manageable and practical for people ready to try something different.
She blends somatic awareness with evidence-informed talk therapies. Sessions often include attention to bodily sensations alongside thoughts and emotions.
Background and approach
That helps when stress and trauma show up as physical tension or when memories feel stuck in the body. Her work draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which supports values-based choices and learning to sit with hard feelings without getting driven by them. She also uses Attachment-Based ideas to help people notice relationship patterns and build safer ways of relating to others.
Maritza trained in counseling and holds a Master’s degree in Psychology Counseling. Her professional license is Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, LMFT, and her California license number is CA LMFT 138711. She has worked in multiple settings over two decades and brings that depth to each session.
Therapy with her is collaborative and paced to each person. People can expect clear, direct conversation, attention to body cues, and practical steps to try between sessions. She supports people through change with steady guidance and straightforward tools.
How Maritza’s approaches fit online therapy
Somatic-informed work pays attention to bodily sensations and movement as part of healing. Online sessions can guide gentle awareness of breath, posture, and tension so clients notice how feelings show up in the body and practice simple grounding techniques at home.Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on clarifying personal values and taking small committed actions toward them. In virtual sessions this often means naming what matters, noticing unhelpful thoughts, and building short experiments to try between meetings.
Attachment-Based Therapy looks at patterns in relationships and how early connections shape current trust and closeness. Online conversations can map those patterns and rehearse new ways of relating with partners or family members when needed.
Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the process. The therapist will work collaboratively to match methods to a person’s goals, preferences, and what shows up in sessions. That means adapting exercises, pacing, and homework to what feels doable for each person.
Online formats - video calls, phone, live chat, and text messaging - offer practical flexibility. They make it easier to fit therapy into busy days, try body-based exercises in the home setting, and review notes or short written check-ins between appointments. These options aim to increase accessibility and let people choose what works best for them.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Blended family issues
- Cancer
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 23 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English, Spanish