Margarita Araiza-Johnston, LCSW

Margarita Araiza-Johnston is an LCSW with ten years of clinical experience based in New Mexico. She works with parents and adults on issues such as family and parenting stress, anxiety, depression, grief, relationship and intimacy concerns, and career or coaching questions. Sessions are offered in English and Spanish.

She trained in social work at Tulane University and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Redlands. Early in her career she worked with children and families in Illinois and California, and later provided hospice social work and suicide and crisis counseling in Louisiana. That background shaped her focus on crisis response and grief work.

Margarita uses several practical methods in her work, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Attachment-Based Therapy, Emotionally-Focused Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, and Narrative Therapy. She applies concrete strategies to notice unhelpful thoughts and change patterns that get in the way of daily functioning. Sessions tend to focus on small, testable changes clients can try between meetings.

She also has training in mediation, including family law mediation, and experience with assessment, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and bilingual therapy. Those skills inform how she approaches family systems, communication problems, codependency, and commitment issues.

Margarita lists additional focus areas such as aging and geriatric concerns, fertility and reproductive issues, BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture, compassion fatigue, and ADHD. People who want straightforward, skills-based sessions about relationships, stress, or life transitions may find the practical approach useful.

Practical approaches and online sessions