Erica de los Reyes

I am a licensed clinical social worker with over 10 years of clinical experience working with youth, young adults, and their natural supports. I have a Bachelors of Science and a Masters in social work from CSU Fullerton and CSU Long Beach, respectively. Both my heart and my expertise lie in youth-centered crisis work, with a majority of my professional experience deriving from community mental health settings. As a social worker I believe context is key, therefore I aim to be dynamic, flexible, and open minded in my clinical approaches. My role in therapy is simple: it is to help a person listen to themselves. I approach all of my work with humor and relational attunement so that a client feels no shame or fear in surfacing their inner world. If you have ever wished that the seriousness of growing up didn’t have to feel so serious, then we would get along swimmingly!

My work is rooted in social justice, intersectionality, and equity and my work is inclusive of all identities and abilities. I aim to be trauma-informed, centering my work around attachment so that the youth I work with can safely experience what I know is true: connection is a basic need. Connection, to me, is grounded in accountability and I love to wade through discomfort with clients and tackle it head on together. I have a wealth of experience working with needs like depression, bipolar, and grief, as well as trauma and the high risk symptoms that accompany it (self-injury, suicidality, etc). I enjoy working with parents and families because I know that the most sustainable positive change for anyone comes from strengthening their community.

Ideally, a session with me makes therapy feel grounded and approachable. My clients are the experts and captains of their lives and it is my job to stay dynamic to their changing needs, situations, and readiness for change. A throughline in all my work is motivational interviewing and attachment theory. For high severity clients, I like to start with solutions-focused and dialectical behavioral therapy to bring awareness, teach coping skills, and help reduce symptoms and risk. To more comfortably explore deeper emotions I utilize client-centered combinations of art, narrative, or bibliotherapy. By the end of our time together, I hope that all my clients are moving towards feeling value-aligned with themselves and more comfortable with where they have been, who they are becoming, and who comes along with them.

As for me, I find that my life always leads me back to creativity. I enjoy creative writing, drawing and painting, and fiber crafts like crochet. I am 10x more likely to finish a project if it is a gift for someone I care about. I collect sonny angels, vinyl of varying genres, and books that I really should get around to reading. After work, you can find me on the couch with my partner and my cat, Miso, playing video games and binging a comfort show for the 10th time. Ultimately, I am a simple kid and am easily satisfied with activities like contemplating, daydreaming, and yapping with a good friend.