Founder & Clinical Director

Licensed Mental Health Counselor, New York

Licensed Professional Counselor, New Jersey

She grew up in the Bronx — in a community that was poor in resources but rich in people. She knows what it means to grow up surrounded by love that could not always find its way to you. To move between homes looking for something stable. To carry anxiety and depression and questions about your own worth that nobody around you had language for.

She also knows what it means to dream past your circumstances. To look at a life that felt very far away and decide it was worth reaching for anyway. To walk into rooms that were not built for you and find a way to belong in them — and to eventually understand that the work was never to fit into those rooms, but to build something better.

That understanding is where Avela began.

She came to psychology because she needed to understand herself. Because understanding people — why they do what they do, what they carry, what they're really asking for when they ask for anything — came more naturally to her than almost anything else. She did not always believe she belonged in this field. She had to be reminded, by someone who saw her clearly, that she did.

She has spent the years since building a practice that does for others what that moment did for her. That sees people clearly. That makes room for them — all of them, regardless of where they come from or what they can pay.

She is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in New York and a Licensed Professional Counselor in New Jersey. She practices through the Avela Method — a framework she built from the inside out, from years of sitting across from people and learning what it actually takes to help someone return to themselves.

She built Avela because she knew it needed to exist. Because she had been the person who needed it and could not find it.

Now it exists.