Margarita Araiza-Johnston
Calm, practical support for family challenges
- Credentials
- LCSW
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed in
- New Mexico, Hawaii, Utah
- Languages
- English, Spanish
- Format
- Online sessions
About Margarita
Margarita Araiza-Johnston uses relationship-focused therapy as her starting point. She draws on attachment-based ideas to help families and parents notice patterns that shape how they relate. Her style is practical and straightforward.
She listens, reflects what she hears, and helps people try small changes that can ease daily struggles. She earned a Master of Social Work from Tulane University and holds a Licensed Clinical Social Worker credential (LCSW). Margarita also has a BA in Sociology and Anthropology with a French minor from the University of Redlands.
Background and approach
Her background includes work with children and families in Illinois and California, and clinical roles in hospice and crisis counseling in Louisiana. In practice she blends methods like attachment work, cognitive behavioral techniques, and emotionally-focused approaches. That mix helps with common parenting and family concerns, anxiety, depression, grief, and relationship tensions.
She also brings experience in safety-focused areas such as child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and suicide prevention. Sessions can be bilingual in English and Spanish, and she has training in mediation and family law mediation. Margarita treats a wide range of issues related to family life - from communication and parenting to fertility and aging concerns.
Her goal is to help families build clearer communication and more dependable ways of solving problems. Parents reading on a phone should know the approach is collaborative. She asks about what’s working, what isn’t, and what small changes a family is willing to try.
The work emphasizes real-life steps parents can take between sessions to improve day-to-day family life.
Using attachment and emotion-focused methods in online sessions
Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on how early and current relationships affect how people connect now. In online work this approach helps parents and family members spot repeating patterns and try new ways of responding to each other that feel safer and more predictable.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts, feelings, and actions connect. In remote sessions CBT is used to identify unhelpful thinking, practice coping skills, and set small behavioral goals that fit everyday family life.
Finding the right fit is part of the process. The therapist collaborates with each family to choose approaches that match their goals, values, and comfort level. Together they evaluate what helps and adjust methods as needed so the work stays practical and relevant.
Online options include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. These choices make it easier to schedule sessions around family life and to follow up between meetings. Remote therapy can let parents access consistent support without lengthy travel, while still using hands-on tools from attachment work and CBT.
Attachment-Based Therapy
Looks at how early bonds shaped what you expect from closeness, and how that plays out now with a partner, a parent, or your own children.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT looks at the link between what you think, how you feel, and what you do. You work on noticing unhelpful patterns and practising steadier responses. It suits online sessions well, because much of the work happens between appointments and can be talked through from anywhere.
Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
Attends to the emotions underneath a recurring argument or distance, and to the attachment needs driving them. Often used where a relationship keeps returning to the same painful loop.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Family conflicts
- Parenting issues
- Depression
Also works with
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture
- Career difficulties
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Multicultural concerns
- Post-traumatic stress
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Stress, Anxiety
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed
- New Mexico, Hawaii, Utah, Oregon, Washington, Arkansas, California
- Languages
- English, Spanish
Next step
Talk to Margarita
- Takes a few minutes
- Nothing to set up just to look
- Stop at any point