Love isn’t a feeling. Love is a set of behaviors. And those behaviors can get complicated.
Marriage and family therapist trainee, researcher, and writer in Los Angeles. Writing about how people manage relationships under strain, and how we use technology to control and manage those relationships.
I work at Cancer Support Community LA, as a trainee MFT.
Working with people living with cancer, and especially their loved ones navigating caregiving, duty, and grief, through group and 1:1 therapy. Supervised by Jennifer Cumiskey, LCSW #94497.
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Writing about love, duty, and the tools we use to deal with hard seasons.
A weekly essay series on how people manage marriage, parent-child, and caregiver dynamics and especially how we use technology to attempt to control the distress coming from these relationships.
Read the essays
How people emote, seek care and try to feel understood online.
I’m interested in the intersection of technology & how we seek care online. Independent research on how we use technology to manage our emotional experiences when caregiving, managing fraught relationships, or in difficult seasons of life.
Email me about the work
Working psychodynamically, with individuals, couples and pre-teens/teens.
Anticipated opening once registration with the Board of Behavioral Sciences comes through. A small caseload of individuals and couples, most likely by video across California. Navigating how illness impacts the marriage, the family, the child, and you.
Email me about therapy in the future
A biobehavioral read on caregiver distress. NCFR, November 2026.
Caregiving Oxytocin Reciprocity Disruption. An early framework for how unpaid care taxes our biology and how caregiver interactions with micro, meso and macro systems all show up in our bodies.
Ask about the framework
About Maria.
I’m a marriage and family therapist trainee in Los Angeles, working at Cancer Support Community Los Angeles under licensed supervision. I write, I research, and I sit with clients, and all three come back to the same question.
How do people navigate love, duty, and obligation?
Before this I spent ten years building products and teams at Microsoft, Shopify, and CHANI, where I was founding director of product & strategy. That work taught me to analyze structure and think systemically.
It is also why I research and write about the way people use technology to ask for emotional support, to express despair, and to try to get control of something.
Because an illness arrives, a court order defines how you parent, or someone dies. These are the moments when the coping skills that used to work stop working, and when the way you relate to the people around you starts to strain. You might start doomscrolling or spiraling online. Relational therapy is useful here.
I’m training in IFS, IFIO, and EMDR alongside my master’s in clinical psychology and my clinical training at the Cancer Support Community.
Supervised by Jennifer Cumiskey, LCSW #94497.