Meet the Team

For over 10 years, Alea has been a mental health professional working with parents, families, and young children. She brings experience in bilingual clinical social work practice, family engagement, trauma, and early childhood development within community mental health settings and schools. Her clinical work has focused primarily on children, birth to 6, and their caregivers, providing various therapeutic interventions that support attachment and social-emotional skill development between the dyad or family. Alea’s clinical work has also included a particular focus on parenting groups.

 

Alea uses an integrative approach, collaborating with families to build reflective capacity, self-compassion, and skill development that supports strong attachment relationships. She seeks to connect to and empower families using genuine warmth and authenticity. Alea works to support healthy emotional development throughout the family structure. She believes that all caregivers deserve support along this transformative journey—to build insight into what we bring to parenting and what parenting brings out in us; to use child development and attachment theories to understand and empathize with the behavior of our children; and to learn and practice skills that serve to nurture stronger family relationships and improved well-being overall.

 

In addition to working in the realm of early childhood wellness and parenting, Alea also provides therapeutic services to school-age children, adolescents, and young adults. In this work, she draws from a range of models and approaches, primarily rooted in a psychodynamic, mind-body integration, trauma-informed, attachment-based approach.

 

Alea is trained in the following evidence-based models:

• Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up Therapy (6 months - 24 months)

• Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (24 months - 6 years old)

• Parent-Child Interaction Therapy Toddler (12 months to 24 months)

• Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (Lifespan)

• Reflective Parenting Program, Center for Reflective Communities in Los Angeles, CA

 

She has received training in Child Parent Psychotherapy, child-centered play therapy, DBT, expressive arts therapies, and other trauma and somatic/mindfulness-based approaches.

 

Alea is a bilingual (Spanish-English) mental health provider, independently-licensed in the District of Columbia and Maryland. Alea graduated with her BA from Vassar College and received a Master’s in Social Work from UCLA. She currently lives in Maryland with her husband and two children.