Mind to Thrive grew out of my years as an Employee Assistance Program clinician. I watched capable, high-achieving women come in to process the harm done to them at work, and I recognized every word because I had lived it. I was once targeted at a job I loved, and I spent years shrinking to survive it. I’m a licensed trauma therapist, and I’ve also been the woman sitting in the toxic workplace wondering if it was all in her head. That’s what makes my coaching different. I treat workplace harm as the trauma it is, not as a communication problem you can fix by being nicer. I’m also a Latina immigrant who rebuilt her life from scratch, so I coach with that lens too.

My first few clients came almost entirely through Instagram, after a handful of my posts took off. The ones that resonated most were about institutional betrayal: watching a toxic person wreck a career you worked hard to build, then reporting them to HR and seeing HR protect them over your pain. People saw those posts and felt validated, like someone was finally saying out loud what they’d been living through quietly. That sense of “she gets it” is what brought them to my inbox, and it’s still the heart of how people find me. That is also how most of my clients come to me, from speaking up about an experience that typically we live through in silence and isolation.

The decision that changed my direction was leaving my role as an EAP manager to run Mind to Thrive full time. I stepped out of a stable system to build something for the women I kept meeting in that work. It’s incredibly scary and rewarding at the same time.

The mistake that taught me the most was trusting a system designed to protect itself. I believed HR existed to keep people safe, when its real job is to protect the institution from liability. I reported that I was being targeted and mistreated by a colleague, and HR dismissed it. Somehow I became the problem. The second mistake grew out of the first: I believed that narrative. I decided I was the problem and shrank myself to fit a mold that was never made for me, because I thought that would keep me safe. It didn’t. It cost me years and nearly burned me out. Now I teach other women that you can’t earn safety by being smaller, and that when a system protects itself over you, it says something about the system, not about your worth.

One thing I’ve seen shift is the belief that therapy is the best fit for processing everything, including workplace toxicity. I believe strongly that therapy is necessary, healing, and effective in many ways. But when you’re healing from a toxic job, one hour a week often isn’t enough. Most sessions go to the crisis of the day or the week, so the hour gets used up on processing and venting, with little room left to strategize or decide what move is most aligned with your goals.

I adapted by building a program where you can process, release, and vent, and also strategize. It includes everything I would have given a client in the therapy room, delivered through a pre-recorded course, plus coaching calls and live Q&As that give you more access to support while you work toward your goals.

Do first: get real training and do your own healing work, because you can’t guide people through what you haven’t faced yourself. Mine came from DBT, trauma neuroscience, and Internal Family Systems. Ignore: the voice, from others or from yourself, that says you’re not good enough. Typically, this is an expression of internalizing the narrative that these workplaces have used to control us and corner us into making ourselves smaller, quieter, and submissive. Challenge it. Someone once told me the letters behind my name don’t mean anything. I kept building anyway, and I’d tell anyone starting out to do the same.