Mirella Stoyanova

Welcome. If you're feeling stuck, anxious or overwhelmed, lonely or depressed, you may not realize that you already have what you need to endure what challenges you are facing and improve your sense of fulfillment in life. With the right guidance in therapy you can begin to generate insights that naturally broaden your perspective, that support you to reconcile rather than simply solve your problems with an unsustainable quick fix. With consistent practice, you can become more mindful and less prone to jumping to the same conclusions. Better yet, you'll get to decide how you want to live based on your own personal values and chosen identity.

As a former crisis worker and therapist of multicultural heritage, my work is grounded in a deep recognition of our complexity as human beings and inherent resilience. Using a strengths-based approach highly informed by evidence based practice, I help my clients cope with and make new meaning of life's challenges so they can find freedom in healing.

Put simply, I provide you with a safe and affirming space, free of judgment, in which to explore what difficulties you are facing with the benefit of being truly seen and heard. To learn more about my practice, you may visit my website at http://www.mirellastoyanova.com/therapy or reach out to schedule your free consultation.

While my approach varies depending on the client and circumstances, I mainly draw on principles from Relational-Cultural Theory, Existential Psychology, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), as well as a small handful of mindfulness-based treatment methods like Buddhist Psychology.

My work is grounded in a commitment to social justice as well as a firm belief in the dignity and worth of all individuals. As a therapist of multicultural heritage, I am deeply aware of my own places of privilege and the complexity that this entails. I incorporate this awareness into my approach, recognizing the ways that our social and political systems have, throughout history, served to disconnect us from ourselves and from each other.

My practice is also trauma-informed meaning that I am trained in evidence-based care practices suited to the unique needs of individuals who seek to recover from traumatic experience. This includes treatment of survivors who have experienced isolated incidents who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as well as those who suffer from chronic occurrences of trauma resulting in what is known as Complex Trauma (C-PTSD).

There are typically one of two directions I take in my first session with a client following our assessment together of your history and background, depending on what your goals are for therapy at the time that you begin treatment. Either we begin with psychoeducation about the human brain and psychobiology, which I believe is fundamental to conversations we will have about your relationship to yourself, or we will begin with a more exploratory conversation surrounding your relationships and what concerns feel most pressing to you. Neither of these two approaches are better than the other, but to begin, I find it helps to offer structure and some grounding in the foundation of what will later unfold more organically as you get to know me, and I, you.