MEET OUR TEAM

Guzman Psychotherapy’s team are here to support you through life challenges, such as the arrival to this country and the achievement of your Migratory Dream.

Established in 2017, and well-known as Metro Atlanta’s premium psychotherapy and immigration evaluation providers, our exceptional counselors specialize in short and long-term psychodynamic, existential, and cognitive behavioral therapy for a range of issues from day to day worries to complex psychological conditions.

Heidy Guzman, MA, NCC, LPC, CPCS CEO and Clinical Director

Heidy Guzman is the owner and clinical director of Guzman Psychotherapy. She is a bilingual licensed professional counselor and a national certified counselor. Her work is integrative and draws from psychodynamic and existential approaches. She has worked in the field of counseling and psychotherapy in Atlanta and abroad since receiving her degree in clinical psychology in 2003 in Colombia, South America. She obtained her second master’s degree in professional counseling from Argosy University in 2007. Heidy is currently enrolled in the Core Program at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. Heidy’s areas of specialty include migration grief, anxiety, depression, and relationship issues.

Heidy’s expertise in immigrant issues has influenced her research, which focuses primarily on cultural competency and migration grief. She has been a speaker and panelist at many conferences locally and abroad, including the American Counseling Association Conference. Her presentation on migration grief was recently offered to graduate students at three universities in Latin America. Additionally, she has served in different capacities for a number of nonprofit organizations including the Latin American Association, The Boys & Girls Clubs of America and most recently as the Executive Director of the Hispanic Health Coalition of Georgia.

MY PHILOSOPHY

I provide you with a safe, confidential space to talk, explore, heal and grow. I’m here to help you to understand your areas of difficulty, gain relief from present symptoms and develop resources to cope in the future. I believe in a mind-body connection so that improvements in psychological well-being translate into physical vitality. The benefits of my psychotherapy and counseling work include self-insight, inner fulfillment, raised self-esteem, a positive outlook and improved relationships.

I am proud to offer therapeutic options to help with many psychological issues, as a counselor, I will help tailor the treatment to your needs.

Counseling deals with issues through discussion and exploration. It is often short-term and I prefer to use person-centered and humanistic techniques. Psychotherapy is similar though it explores issues in greater depth and may be long-term. Psychotherapists often make use of psychodynamic, existential and psychoanalytic principles.

Some counseling research studies have shown that the most important variable in a successful course of therapy is the quality of the relationship between the client and therapist. It is important that you feel that you can connect with your therapist, regardless of their theoretical approach.

Clara Camila Garcia, PhD Director of Clinical Programs and Research

Dr. Garcia received her Doctorate of Philosophy in Psychology. She also hods a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. Dr. Garcia areas of specialty include stress, coping, and parent-child therapeutic interventions. At Guzman Psychotherapy, she will provide mental health coaching to children, adolescents and young adults.

Her expertise has influenced her research, which focuses primarily on informal caregivers of children with disabilities, proposing a therapeutic intervention focused on self-care.

Dr. Garcia has been publishing articles in indexed scientific journals about her area of expertise; her scientific production has focused on Reactions and Coping Strategies, objective-subjective burden and the psychological approach to parents of children with a diagnosis of disability.

She has been a speaker at many internationally conferences presenting her doctoral research.

Nella Alvarado Mental Health Coach

Marianella Alvarado-Michel received a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Kennesaw State University. She did her 6 months internship at the Wellstar Hospital psychiatric unit, where learned skills in short-term crisis intervention, stabilization, follow-up, and outpatient care.

For 13 years she worked in the field of addiction as a Dual Diagnosis counselor providing support, counseling, and treatment for people with substance use, sex addiction, codependency, and co-occurring mental health disorders.

In her search for improving people’s lives, she trained as a Wellness and Health Coach at Emory University where she learned how to help individuals gain knowledge, skills, and confidence to take responsibility for their physical and mental health and their lifestyles. For the past 5 years, her focus has been working with clients to improve their mental health by educating and motivating them to make long-term changes that can improve their overall wellbeing.

Marianella’s main goal as a Wellness and Mental Health Coach is to provide a safe, compassionate, and powerful environment for patients to feel motivated enough to make important and long-lasting changes in their health.

THERAPEUTIC APPROACHES

Psychodynamic therapy stresses the importance of the unconscious and past experience in shaping current behavior. By encouraging individuals to explore unresolved issues and to talk about important people and relationships in their life they can increase their self-awareness and understanding of how the past is influencing present problems. Compared to psychoanalytic therapy, psychodynamic therapy seeks to provide a quicker solution for more immediate problems.
Existential therapy helps individuals deal with the problems of everyday living such as relationship difficulties, anxiety issues, body issues and others. Unlike other approaches, existential therapy acknowledges that within all our lives we may face times when our own particular struggles can feel overwhelming and we may behave in ways that seem irrational in response to these problems. By reflecting on these issues and by building self-knowledge and self-awareness clients are able to grow and overcome issues which may at times feel all consuming. The role of the existential therapist is really to work alongside the client in exploring their values, assumptions and ideals and to make them feel like they choose their destiny through making the choices, they want to make.
Person-centered therapy evolved in the 50s and 60s and views all individuals as capable of being loved, creative and knowledgeable. However, this approach also recognizes that achieving our full potential requires favorable conditions and that sometimes in adverse conditions individuals may not be able to develop in ways they could. For example, sometimes we behave in ways that can elicit positive regard from the people around us but that we ourselves are not happy with and similarly we can elicit negative reaction when we do not behave as they expect. Overtime, we may lose touch with what we really want and our ability to achieve our potential becomes stifled. During therapy, the therapist will aim to provide an environment in which the individual does not feel under threat or judged. This allows the individual to experience and accept more of them as a person and move towards recognizing their potential. By demonstrating genuineness, empathy and unconditional positive regard, the therapist can create an environment where the patient finds their own solutions to their problems.