Latine therapy in Palo Alto for a story that does not fit one country.
What Brings People Here
The word covers a lot of ground.
So do the lives inside it.
The one who was supposed to make it
Family Obligation · First Generation
First in the family to finish college, or to work in an office, or to buy a house. The success is real and so is what came attached to it. Money that goes home every month. A phone that rings when something breaks. A quiet arithmetic where your own wants come after everyone else’s needs, and where saying so out loud feels like a kind of betrayal.
A family that is the center of everything, including the pressure
Family Systems · Loyalty
Closeness is the good part. It is also the part that leaves very little room. Decisions get made with everyone’s opinion in them. Distance reads as rejection. Setting any kind of limit gets heard as a rejection of the whole family, which is not what you meant and may be what lands anyway.
Waiting on paperwork that decides what you can plan
Mixed-Status Families · Uncertainty
Some families have one status among them and some have four. Some clients grew up as the one who could translate, sign, and make the phone calls. Others are the ones with documents in a household where others do not have them. The uncertainty shapes what you allow yourself to plan for, and it does not resolve just because a life looks stable from the outside.
Faith that holds a great deal, and does not hold everything
Faith · Community
For many clients the church has been the thing that held the family together. Prayer has been the first response, and sometimes the only one. Therapy can sit alongside that rather than in place of it. For some clients the harder question is what happens when you no longer believe the way your parents do, and have not told them.
Being told what you are, and by whom
Identity · Belonging
Not Latine enough for one room, too Latine for another. Spanish that is fluent, or halting, or was never taught. Afro-Latine and Indigenous clients often carry a version of this that other people in the same community do not see. Being asked where you are really from, by people who share your last name.
Grief carried at a distance
Transnational Family · Loss
A grandmother who died while you were in a meeting. A funeral you attended by video. Parents aging in another country, and the ongoing math of whether you can get there and what it costs if you do. This kind of loss rarely gets the same acknowledgment as loss that happens nearby, and it is not smaller for that.
The Team
The people you’d be working with.
Moitreyee Chowdhury
LMFT 121934 · LPCC 9238 · EMDR Trained
Couples · Individual · Family · Trauma
Moitreyee started Leela after years of watching South Asian and immigrant couples get asked to explain themselves before anyone actually listened. Her couples work draws on CBT, DBT, Family Systems, and trauma-focused approaches, but it always begins with what each person walked in already carrying. She studied fine arts in Delhi, built and fabricated puppets for stage productions in Germany, and has practiced in California for over two decades. She is also a published poet. Sessions in English, Hindi, and Bengali.
Neeraja Muthal
AMFT 144185 Supervised by Moitreyee
Couples · Individual · Family · Trauma
I am an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist. Before becoming a therapist, I spent many years as a computer engineer but felt drawn to a more human-centered profession. That led me to earn my Master's in Counseling Psychology from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. I have experience working with adults navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, work-related stress, couple conflicts, parenting challenges, and major life transitions. My approach is collaborative and integrative, drawing from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), psychodynamic, client-centered, solution-focused, and relational approaches.
Teresa Gamez DePerez
LMFT 152063 · Spanish · Family · Trauma · Couples · Individual
Teresa Gamez is a trauma-informed mental health therapist who provides compassionate, culturally responsive therapy for adults and couples in California. She supports clients navigating trauma, anxiety, depression, relationship challenges, grief and loss, difficult life transitions, and recurring family or generational patterns. Her approach focuses on creating a safe, nonjudgmental space where clients can better understand themselves, develop healthier coping strategies, strengthen relationships, and build emotional resilience. She provides therapy in both English and Spanish.
“A practice where the basics will not need defining, and where nobody assumes your family is like the last Latine family who sat here.”
Clinical Methods
Evidence-based approaches,
chosen for the person actually in front of us
Leela Mental Health uses four primary modalities. Which approach leads depends on what is driving the difficulty, how long it has been present, and what needs attention first.
CBT
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
CBT looks at the relationship between what you are thinking and what follows from it. Where guilt about wanting your own life, or a constant sense of falling short of what the family sacrificed for, is part of the picture, CBT makes that loop visible enough to work with. It is adapted to sit alongside your values rather than against them.
DBT
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
DBT offers usable skills for the moments when the feeling is too large to think through. It is also useful for the specific difficulty of holding two things at once: love for a family and a need for room inside it, or gratitude for what was sacrificed alongside anger about what it cost.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
EMDR is for difficulty with a history behind it, something that happened and was never fully processed, so the nervous system is still responding years later. A crossing. A separation. A raid, a detention, or a deportation in the family. Violence in a home country. Discrimination here. EMDR is offered by clinicians at Leela who are EMDR trained, including founder Moitreyee Chowdhury.
Family Systems
Family Systems Work
For many clients the difficulty is not only individual. It lives in inherited roles, in unspoken rules about who is allowed to need things, and in a family structure that often includes grandparents, tíos, comadres, and people who are family without being related. This work makes those structures visible without turning it into a case against your family. What you keep is yours to decide.
Who Comes to Leela
Different generations
different weight.
Leela Mental Health offers Latine therapy to adults, young adults, teens, couples, and families. What people arrive carrying tends to differ by generation.
Adults holding the family up
Second generation, and the space between two sets of rules
Families and parents across generations
Parents who came here and children who were born here, trying to talk to each other across a gap that neither one made. Family sessions at Leela make room for both sides of that, including the parts that are usually said only in one language, or only to a sibling, or not at all.
Why Leela
A starting point built with care, not a finished answer.
Cultural humility, especially about a word this broad.
Latine covers people from more than twenty countries, several languages, and histories that have very little in common beyond a term other people chose. A Salvadoran family in San Jose, a Puerto Rican family in the East Bay, a Brazilian family who may not use the word at all, and a Oaxacan family who speak Mixtec at home are not one experience. What Leela offers is a starting point where the basics will not need defining. Your family, we still ask about, and we will not assume yours resembles the last one.
Clinically rigorous methods: CBT, DBT, EMDR, Family Systems.
Each is chosen for the specific pattern you are carrying rather than handed out as a standard package. Work with immigrant and second-generation clients often moves between them, because grief, family structure, and the effects of long uncertainty do not respond to the same tools.
Sessions in English, and honesty about what else is available.
Sessions at Leela are currently offered in English, and with the founder in Hindi and Bengali. If you would rather work in Spanish or Portuguese, tell us when you reach out and we will tell you plainly what is available now rather than what we hope will be available later.
What people ask before reaching out.
Do you offer therapy for Latine clients in Palo Alto?
Do you have a Spanish-speaking therapist?
Do you offer therapy in Spanish in Palo Alto?
I am not sure "Latine" is the word I use for myself. Does this page apply to me?
My family thinks therapy is for people who are really sick. How do I explain this?
My family's immigration status is complicated. Is it safe to talk about that here?
Do you offer telehealth therapy for Latine clients across California?
What does therapy cost, and does insurance cover it?
Related Services
Parent & Family Therapy
For parents and adult children trying to talk across a gap neither of them made.
Couples Therapy
For partners carrying two family systems, and sometimes two countries, into one relationship.
Trauma & EMDR
For experiences that the nervous system has not finished with, including separation, violence, and long uncertainty.
Anxiety & Burnout
For the exhaustion of being the person everyone else relies on.
Good Faith Estimate: If you are paying out of pocket or not using insurance, you have the right to a written Good Faith Estimate before your first session. Read the full notice ➞
Some of this has been waiting for a room
where it can be said plainly.
When you are ready, this is where to begin.
We respond within 48 hours.