Noelia Perez

I've been doing this work for over 20 years, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the people who show up in my office are usually the ones everyone else leans on. You're the parent holding the family together, the teacher giving everything you have to kids who need it, the eldest sibling who's been "the strong one" since you were young, the professional carrying invisible labor no one else sees. My job is to give you a place to finally set some of that down.

I'm a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), licensed in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Florida, and I'm bilingual in English and Spanish. I earned my Master of Social Work from the University at Albany, SUNY, in 2002, and since then, I've worked across community mental health, reproductive support, family therapy, and educator wellness. I'm also a Clinical Supervisor here at Steady Compass and an EAP provider, so many of my clients, especially teachers, healthcare workers, and corporate professionals, access care with me through their workplace benefits.

Clinically, I specialize in a few areas close to my heart: infertility and reproductive mental health, parenting a neurodiverse child, and teacher and educator burnout. I also work with BIPOC and bilingual clients navigating anxiety, life transitions, and the layered stress of living and working in a world that often expects too much. My approach is trauma-informed and culturally responsive, and I draw from CBT, DBT, and family systems work, but always calibrated to your culture, your language, and your actual life, not a one-size-fits-all script.

I see clients virtually across all four states I'm licensed in, and I'm also available in person in Nyack, NY, by request. However we meet, my goal is the same: for you to feel fully heard in our time together, and to leave with something that actually fits your life not just an idea of how things are "supposed" to go.

My approach is direct, warm, and deeply attuned. I don't believe good therapy has to be one or the other. I want you to feel truly seen and heard in our sessions, but I'm also not going to just nod along. If I notice a pattern, or something that isn't serving you, I'll name it, gently but honestly. That combination tends to work well for the clients I see. Most people who are used to holding things together for everyone else need someone who can meet them with both softness and substance.

Clinically, my work is trauma-informed and culturally responsive, and I calibrate everything to your language, your culture, and your lived experience rather than applying a generic template. I draw from a few different frameworks depending on what you need: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and DBT skills when you need concrete tools for regulating emotions or shifting patterns; family systems work when the stress is relational; and reproductive mental health frameworks for clients navigating infertility or loss. I'm bilingual in English and Spanish, and that fluency isn't just linguistic; it shapes how I understand family, obligation, grief, and identity for the clients I work with.

My specialties tend to cluster around people carrying a particular kind of weight: couples and individuals moving through infertility and reproductive grief, parents raising a neurodiverse child who are exhausted from constantly advocating and adapting, and teachers and educators worn down by compassion fatigue and under-resourced systems. Across it all, my focus is the same: helping you stop performing and start actually processing, so that whatever we build together fits the life you're really living, not the one you think you're supposed to be living.

Your first session with me is really about slowing down enough for me to understand the full picture, not just the symptom or the struggle that brought you in, but the life around it. I'll ask about what's going on for you right now, but also about your background, your culture, your language, your relationships, and what's actually been sustaining you (or not) up to this point. If you're coming to me around infertility, parenting a neurodiverse child, or burnout as an educator, I want to understand the specific shape that's taken in your life, not just the general category.

I create a space that's warm but direct. I'm not going to make you perform wellness for me, and I'm not going to tiptoe around hard things either. A lot of my clients are used to holding everything together for everyone else, so the first session is often the first time in a long while someone has asked about them, with no agenda other than actually listening.

By the end of that first session, my goal is for you to feel two things: genuinely heard, and like you have a sense of where we're headed together. We'll talk about what's brought you in, what you're hoping will be different, and I'll share some initial thoughts on how I'd approach working with you, whether that's trauma-informed care, CBT, or DBT skills, family systems work, or a blend, depending on what fits. This isn't a one-size-fits-all process. Whatever we build together needs to actually work for your life, your culture, and what you're carrying, not just check a clinical box.

And if for any reason I'm not the right fit, I'll tell you that honestly too, and help point you toward someone who is.