Culture & identity
Culture as a lens, not a footnote.
We are interested in culture as a lens for contextualizing the difficulties our patients face. That is a working method rather than a stated value: it means the societal context is never taken for granted, and never treated as background noise behind the “real” clinical material.
You cannot be understood apart from where you come from. The question we care about is quieter: what it asks of you, and what you want.
That asks something of us too. It takes a therapist who knows that their own view is a view.
Themes we may explore
Themes that come up again and again.
Understanding generational trauma. What happened to the people who raised you, and to the people who raised them, does not stay in the past. It arrives as a set of rules about what is safe to want, what must never be spoken outside the family, and what you owe. Often the person carrying it never witnessed the original event, only the adaptations built around it.
The effects of marginalization. The cumulative, unspectacular weight of being treated as lesser, and what it does to a person to have that consistently minimized. Part of the work is separating what is yours from what was done to you.
Sitting with privilege. Recognizing advantage you did not ask for, without collapsing into guilt or defending against it, is real psychological work, and it tends to sit close to shame, which is where therapy is useful.
Intersectionality. Race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, immigration history, and disability compound and complicate each other, and a person is rarely dealing with one of them in isolation.
Identity
Gender, sexuality, and the rest of who you are.
We work with people of all different gender and sexual identities, and we are LGBTIQ+ allies. In practice that means your identity is not the thing being treated. Coming out, transition, family rupture, and chosen family are all workable material. So is everything in your life that has nothing whatever to do with any of it.
Disability
Living with disability.
Both the practical reality and the way other people respond to it, which is frequently the harder part. Disability and chronic illness also bring losses that are rarely recognized as losses, and a constant negotiation with systems, workplaces and family that has to be carried on top of everything else.
Unfortunately, our office is not wheelchair accessible. Telehealth is available anywhere in California, and may be an option if the building would be a barrier for you.
Language
Therapy in English and in Spanish.
En español
Hay cosas que solo se pueden decir en el idioma en que ocurrieron. Como escribe Lillian Comas-Díaz en Multicultural Care: A Clinician’s Guide to Cultural Competence (2012), el sentimiento y la memoria están ligados al idioma en que se formaron, y trabajar en una segunda lengua puede mantener una experiencia a cierta distancia aunque las palabras sean exactas. Así que cuando el idioma que usted habla mantiene algo a distancia, eso pasa a formar parte de lo que hablamos.
Atendemos en inglés y en español. La Dra. Demi Orozco, Psy.D. atiende en español a niños, adolescentes y adultos, tanto en terapia individual como familiar.
In English
Some things are only sayable in the language they happened in. As Lillian Comas-Díaz writes in Multicultural Care: A Clinician’s Guide to Cultural Competence (2012), feeling and memory are bound up in the language they were formed in, and working in a second language can hold an experience at a remove even when the words are accurate. So when the language you are speaking is keeping something at arm’s length, that becomes part of what we talk about.
We see clients in English and in Spanish. Dr. Demi Orozco, Psy.D. works in Spanish with children, teenagers and adults, in both individual and family therapy.
Take the next step
A first conversation costs nothing but a phone call.
Call us and we will talk through what you are looking for, answer your questions about how we work, and help you find the therapist on our team who fits. If we are not the right place for you, we will tell you that too, and point you somewhere better.
(828) 342-2977