Margarita Araiza-Johnston, LCSW

Margarita Araiza-Johnston is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) who combines practical therapies to help people cope with big life changes. She draws on a decade of experience supporting people through grief, stress, anxiety, family problems, and midlife transitions. She offers therapy in English and Spanish and works from New Mexico.

Margarita uses approaches that focus on how relationships and past experiences shape feelings today. She often blends attachment-based ideas with cognitive-behavioral techniques to help people notice unhelpful patterns and try different responses. Sessions are conversational and goal-oriented, with space to process emotions and plan practical steps.

Her background includes work in hospice care and crisis counseling, including suicide prevention. She also has experience with family systems, child abuse and neglect assessments, and domestic violence matters. That history informs how she addresses complex emotional and safety concerns.

Margarita trained at Tulane University, where she earned a Master of Social Work, and earlier studied sociology and anthropology. She also completed training in mediation and family law mediation, which contributes to her focus on communication and resolving conflict.

People come to her for a wide range of concerns, from parenting and relationship stress to career questions, identity issues, and compassion fatigue. She works with those facing attachment difficulties, intimacy-related issues, codependency, and challenges tied to aging or fertility. Her approach aims to be straightforward, empathetic, and practical.

How her approaches fit with online therapy

Margarita uses attachment-based ideas and cognitive-behavioral techniques to shape her online work. Attachment-based therapy looks at how early relationships affect current patterns and helps people change how they relate to others. It can be useful for intimacy, communication, and connection concerns. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and changing behaviors to reduce anxiety and depression symptoms and to build coping skills.

She also draws on Emotionally-Focused Therapy ideas when emotions and relationship patterns are central. That approach helps name strong feelings and create new ways of responding in close relationships. Choosing the best approach is a shared process; the therapist will discuss goals, try strategies, and adjust the plan together with each person.

Online therapy can make it easier to fit sessions into a busy life by removing travel time and allowing sessions during breaks or between errands. Different session arrangements may be offered, but current session formats should be confirmed before booking. The focus is on practical help that can be used between meetings, such as skill practice, communication planning, and short coaching tasks that fit into daily routines.