About Maria
Maria Cusimano-Carl is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 22 years of experience in California. She has provided care for adults and brings a steady, practical approach to stressful and painful life changes. She helps people manage anxiety and depression in straightforward ways.
She also supports those dealing with relationship strain, family problems, and low self-esteem. Maria has worked with people facing addiction and relapse concerns, and she has led groups on relapse prevention and rebuilding trust after sobriety.
How Maria works
Her work addresses practical issues like communication problems, commitment worries, and control issues. She also has experience with adoption and foster care matters, attachment concerns, autism and Asperger syndrome, fertility and caregiver stress, and chronic illness or pain. Maria pays attention to past family patterns while focusing on present challenges.
Maria uses several therapy approaches to match each person's needs. She draws on client-centered methods to follow a person's goals, cognitive behavioral tools to change unhelpful thoughts and actions, and psychodynamic ideas to notice recurring patterns from the past. Motivational interviewing and dialectical skills are also part of her toolbox.
Sessions are offered to adults and are aimed at clear steps people can try between meetings. The tone is calm and practical, with an emphasis on building better communication and realistic coping skills.
Maria lists 6 ways of working on the entry:
What Maria works with
The areas below are the ones Maria selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- Adoption and foster care
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- Guilt and shame
- HIV / AIDS
- Life purpose
- Narcissism
- Post-traumatic stress
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Women's issues
Training and background
| Register | LMFT |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 22 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | California |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
Therapeutic approaches and online care
Maria integrates client-centered therapy by listening closely and following what matters most to the individual, helping people set goals and build on their strengths. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing new behaviors to reduce anxiety and depression. Dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, teaches practical skills for managing intense emotions and improving communication in difficult moments.Finding the right approach is part of the work together. She will collaborate with each person to choose which methods to try based on goals, needs, and preferences. That plan can change over time as progress is made and new challenges arise.
Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy easier to fit into a busy life. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation, phone sessions use less bandwidth, live chat can suit short check-ins, and text messaging supports ongoing reflection between meetings. These options help people stay consistent with care while balancing work, family, and other responsibilities.
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Common questions
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A practical next step
Write down two things you would want to be different in six months. That is the most useful thing to bring to a first session, whoever it is with. If you would rather start now than keep reading, online sessions are the quickest route.
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