GET TO KNOW DAVID

David Cuellar, LMSW

Associate Therapist

David Cuellar uses his knowledge of mental health and therapeutic modalities to help clients realize their full cognitive and emotional potential. This process helps break down mental blockades that might seem immovable. Striking an invaluable balance between validation and accountability, David believes real work begins with assessing how one thinks, talks, and sees the world while subsequently challenging cognitive distortions as they arise. David’s therapeutic flow is gentle and firm. Meeting the patient where they are emotionally, David offers a compassionate, nonjudgmental, and motivational space. He strives to set the client up so they can rely on themselves for support after building the necessary skills in therapy.

With his clients, David takes a collaborative and integrative approach. While acknowledging that he cannot personally relate to individuals’ layered life experiences, David’s clinical and personal work has provided him with a mastery of the coping skills and emotional regulation tools needed to manage life’s trauma, obstacles, and curve balls. His first course of action in a therapeutic setting is not to leap to a mental diagnosis, but rather to agree on client objectives and teach clients how to work with the symptoms they exhibit to improve functioning and overall life satisfaction. Whether one’s cognitive impediment is constant rumination about a relationship’s past, persistent anxiety about a future responsibility, or overwhelm about a current life trajectory or personal identity, David aims to help steer his clients through life’s uneven terrain.

David received academic training at Fordham University, followed by clinical training at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, where he learned to take a strengths-based, relational, and trauma-informed approach to his work with people. David gained clinical experience across diverse settings, including hospitals, clinics, and community centers, where he encountered a wide array of cases. These cases included substance users, folks moving through major life transitions, individuals experiencing grief, OCD patients, and people navigating anxious and depressive symptoms, to name a few. Specializing in adult care, David is committed to his clients and knows that therapy is intrinsically individual. Using a variety of modalities tailored to the client’s goals, David hopes to lead his clients to elevate the most important relationship of all: the one with their own mind.