Erin Costello

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a Master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling from California State University, Fullerton. I have several years experience working with children, adolescents, and young adults, supporting clients through anxiety, depression, emotional dysregulation, grief, relationship difficulties, complex trauma, and major life transitions.

I specialize in working with neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ clients, with a specific interest in exploring the overlap between neurodiversity and queer identity. As a NeuroQueer therapist myself, I understand how meaningful it can be to have a therapist who recognizes the ways identity, neurodivergence, and lived experiences intersect. I strive to create a space where clients can show up as their whole selves without feeling the need to mask, minimize, or explain away important parts of who they are.

I believe therapy should be collaborative, affirming, and grounded in an understanding of the whole person. My approach is intersectional, strengths-based, neurodiversity-affirming, queer-affirming, and trauma-focused. Rather than viewing symptoms in isolation, I’m interested in understanding the experiences, identities, relationships, environments, and systems that have shaped you.

I also believe that therapy should work with you, not against you. My goal isn’t to make you fit into a largely neurotypical and cishet world, but to help you better understand yourself, process experiences that have impacted you, and develop strategies that support the life you want to build. We’ll draw on your existing strengths while working together to build self-compassion, increase insight, process trauma, reduce symptoms, and foster meaningful growth.

Your first session is an opportunity for us to get to know one another and begin building a foundation for our work together. I’ll ask questions about what brings you to therapy, your current concerns, your history, relationships, identities, strengths, and the experiences that have shaped you. We’ll also talk about what you hope to get out of therapy and what feels most important to you right now.

You don’t need to have everything figured out before you come in. We’ll take our time getting a fuller picture of what you’re experiencing, and I’ll make space for questions about the therapy process along the way. From there, we’ll work together to identify goals and create a treatment plan that feels collaborative, realistic, and meaningful to you.