Hi, I’m Ana.

I’m a therapist, clinical supervisor, coach, educator, business owner, and mom with 16 years of experience in the mental health field.

My first word as a child was literally “why.”

Which, in hindsight, feels pretty on-brand.

I’ve always wanted to understand how things work — what causes something, what connects to what, and what’s happening underneath the surface.

I actually started college as an engineering major.

At some point, though, I realized I was much more interested in understanding people than machines.

So my questions shifted.

How do humans work?

How do relationships work?

How do families shape us?

Why do people repeat patterns they know are hurting them?

Why can two people love each other and still get caught in the same painful cycle?

And eventually: what’s happening inside of us when one part of us wants to do something differently, but another part seems determined to keep doing what it has always done?

Apparently, I never stopped asking why. I just changed what I was studying.

I started my career working with children.

Some of my earliest clinical work was with kids and families, and that experience shaped the way I understand people to this day.

When you work with children, you learn pretty quickly that behavior rarely tells the whole story.

You start looking underneath it.

What is this child trying to communicate?

What happened before this reaction?

What do they need that they don’t yet know how to ask for?

What is happening in the family system around them?

Over time, my work shifted more toward adults — but in some ways, I’m still doing the same work.

Now I often help adults understand and care for the younger parts of themselves that learned how to survive, connect, perform, keep the peace, or protect themselves long before they had words for what was happening.

There’s something really meaningful to me about having started by working directly with children and eventually helping adults heal the parts of themselves that were formed in childhood.

I’m endlessly interested in how people grow.

Education and personal growth have always been a huge part of who I am.

I love learning. I love taking complicated ideas and making them understandable. And I love the moment when something clicks for someone and they suddenly see themselves, a relationship, or a pattern differently.

That’s part of why teaching naturally became another branch of my work.

As a clinical supervisor, I help developing therapists grow their confidence, judgment, self-awareness, and ability to navigate the parts of therapy that can’t always be learned from a textbook.

I also create educational resources and continuing education courses for clinicians around the topics I care most about — attachment, trauma, relationships, protective patterns, therapist self-awareness, and what actually helps people create deeper change.

Eventually, my curiosity expanded beyond traditional mental health care.

The longer I worked in this field, the harder it became for me to separate emotional health from the rest of the body.

Our nervous systems matter.

Our physical health matters.

Sleep, nutrition, movement, stress, relationships, attachment, environment, and the information we consume can all influence how we feel and function.

That curiosity is what eventually led me to create ROOT Wellness Hub, an integrative space designed to bring mental and physical wellness providers together.

I wanted a space where therapy could exist alongside things like trauma-informed yoga, nutrition, and other approaches to wellness.

Not because every person needs every service.

But because humans are complicated, and sometimes the answer to “why do I feel this way?” doesn’t live entirely inside one discipline.

ROOT was built around the same question I’ve apparently been asking my whole life:

What’s underneath this?

I’m also a business owner — which has taught me a lot about carrying weight.

I understand what it feels like to have a brain that rarely wants to turn off because there is always something else you could be thinking about.

And I know how easy it is for capable people to become the person who carries everything.

That’s a big part of why I enjoy working with professionals, business owners, and leaders.

Doing your own work isn’t separate from being good at what you do.

Knowing how to set boundaries, communicate clearly, tolerate other people’s disappointment, regulate yourself under pressure, and stop taking responsibility for things that aren’t yours can make you a better leader, partner, parent, and human being.