Justin Gillespie
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
LMFT #156860
justin@mcaft.com
650-297-3400 x 19
Location: San Jose, Los Altos
Fee: $200
Areas of Focus:
Languages: English, Spanish, Italian
Teens: Trauma, Emotional Dysregulation, Anxiety (Social Anxiety, Academic / Athletic Stress, Perfectionism), Depression, Relationship Issues, Peer Challenges, Developmental Identity & Acculturation Issues.
Adults & Couples: Complex Trauma, Early Childhood Trauma, Spirituality, Relationships, Anxiety, Life Transitions, Career Choices, Job Burnout, Neurodiverse adults.
Modalities:
Certified Internal Family Systems Therapist with Level 2 (trained at IFS-I), Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR), Psychodynamic, Attachment Based, Existential, Mindfulness-Based Somatic Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for Couples.
Background:
Justin has many years of experience working with teens, adults, and couples with a wide array of life-experiences and professional backgrounds. He works collaboratively with each client to help them have a therapeutic experience that is both healing and transformative, liberating them from whatever it is that holds them back from actualizing the life they aspire to.
As a certified Internal Family Systems therapist, Justin works with clients to experience themselves, their relationships, and their lives in a way that more fully aligns with their deepest values and integrates all of their parts. He is passionate about working with the effects of trauma in all its forms, helping clients to live with an increased sense of freedom and aliveness in the present, using Internal Family Systems, which privileges a safe and gentle collaboration. Justin works with each client to create a warm, supportive and secure relationship that is the incubator for growth and healing.
Experience:
Having lived and worked for years both in Italy and in Ireland, being fluent in Spanish and Italian, Justin is accustomed to listening within different cultural and linguistic frames, focusing on the client's unique experience and personality. He has worked with multicultural teens in the Sunnyvale School district, Latinx youth and their families in school-based settings, as well as individual adults and couples throughout the Bay Area as an IFS therapist.
Justin has approximately twenty years of experience sitting with people in deep pain, serving as a companion for people as they face the bewilderment of life's choices and crossroads, and supporting people as they open to their desires for growth and transformation. He has worked with traumatic wounds, the challenges of life transitions and the experience of paralysis in undesired situations. Justin believes that a therapeutic relationship that is simultaneously challenging and radically safe can open the door to a future life that might feel impossible in the present but could be experienced as a true blessing as it ultimately unfolds.
Education and Training:
Certified Internal Family Systems Therapist, Level 2
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy Externship
EMDR Trained
Palo Alto University, MA in Counseling
Università della Santa Croce, Doctorate in Theology, Rome, Italy
University of Dallas, MA, English Literature
University of Dallas, BA, English Literature