Arturo Covarrubias, LMFT

Hello my name is Arturo Covarrubias and I am a Mexican-American, bilingual, male therapist with 9 years of experience treating survivors of trauma in both English and Spanish.  Trauma has likely been a heavy burden that you have had to carry throughout your life and as much as you have attempted to forget, ignore, or will it out of your experience, it continues to impact your relationships and overall well-being. Together we’ll act on your intuition to speak openly about your trauma and to hold and express deeply held feelings about it. We’ll work to reclaim, and explore your LatinX culture so that it becomes a well of strength, healing, and inspiration for your future. Lastly, we’ll do all this in a trauma informed way and uncover the innate strength, will, and intelligence it has taken to survive. You’ll know you’ve begun to heal when your trauma, once an unscalable boulder, becomes a stepping stone along your path. I look forward to meeting you and our work together.

Therapies Offered:

Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT):

CPT is an evidence based treatment that has been shown to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as well as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).  It is a short term goal directed therapy that can be completed in as little as 12 therapy sessions. This means that each session of therapy includes specific education and interventions that are completed. A simple way to think about this is the therapist drives the car and the client is in the passenger seat. Every session is a new stop where we learn about and practice skills designed to reduce trauma symptoms. In this treatment there is a beginning middle and end.

Prolonged Exposure (PE):

Research suggests avoidance of memories, thoughts, feelings and other reminders of trauma maintain trauma symptoms. A way to illustrate this concept is when we learn to ride a bike we likely will fall. If we stop attempting to learn after our first fall we will forever associate a bicycle with falling. This association will remain unchanged until we have a new experience. In time as our ability to ride improves we learn there is some danger in riding a bicycle but that falling is not the only outcome and that a more likely outcome is positive and enjoyable.

Similarly prolonged exposure works against avoidance by safely guiding the client to recount the detailed story of their trauma each session. Avoidance is also targeted by safely assisting the survivor in approaching avoided places, objects, etc. Prolonged Exposure is commonly completed in 12-20 sessions of weekly therapy.

Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET):

Narrative Exposure Therapy targets trauma symptoms by first creating a timeline of the traumas experienced in a survivors life in chronological order from birth to the present in the first few sessions. This provides an opportunity for survivors who have experienced multiple traumas to address each trauma specifically. The remaining sessions are dedicated to narrating and processing each traumatic experience. This consists of the survivor recounting the trauma to the therapist who then records the traumas by either typing or physically writing. The therapist is responsible for guiding the survivors narration so that emotions are expressed and the trauma is ultimately processed. In the end the narrations of the traumas are read back in chronological order as a final means in processing. NET is commonly completed in 12-20, 90 minute sessions.

Arturo Covarrubias, LMFT