Early loss initiated me onto a path at fifteen — my sister’s cancer diagnosis, and everything else that came apart at the same time. I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of a long education in what it means to be human.

The questions it left me with took me deep into forests and deserts, to live in a Zen temple in Asia, to sit with dying people at the Zen Hospice Project, to study at CIIS, to grieve properly at the Orphan Wisdom School. I was looking for what most of my clients are looking for — not just relief, but meaning. Not just survival, but some understanding of why any of this is happening and what we’re supposed to do with it.

What I found, slowly and not without cost, is that the best healing always turns you back toward yourself — and then toward each other. That is the whole point. Not freedom from relationship, but the capacity to be genuinely present within it.What I found, slowly and not without cost, is that the best healing always turns you back toward yourself — and then toward each other.

When I’m not working you’ll find me watching orca pods pass by my window on Puget Sound, birding on coastal trails, cooking for friends, studying astrology, or crocheting into the night with a good audiobook.

I am half Mexican American, half Caucasian. I am bisexual and I live inside queer community. I have family and close friends who are trans. I tell you this not as a performance of diversity but as clinical information — because if you are queer, mixed, navigating multiple worlds, living between categories that were never designed with you in mind, you deserve to know before you walk in the door that you will not have to explain yourself here.

I am also a practitioner of decolonizing therapy. Which means I don’t believe my job is to help you adjust to a broken culture. I believe the culture is often what needs examining — the systems, the inherited beliefs, the family patterns, the racial and colonial wounds that live in the body long after the explicit harm has ended. Therapy that helps you cope with oppression without naming it isn’t healing. It’s adaptation. I work differently.

My undergraduate years were spent studying forestry. I came to that field loving the Earth — its systems, its intelligence, its refusal to be reduced to its utility. I left it understanding something that has stayed with me: that extraction always has a cost, that everything is connected, that what happens in the soil happens in the soul. I am more Terry Tempest Williams than timber industry. Ecological grief, the inner and outer landscape as one continuous terrain, the sense that we are part of something vast and alive — these are not metaphors for me. They are how I understand what it means to be human.

I have sat across from some of the most credentialed therapists in the field — as a client. What I remember is not their training. What I remember is whether they were genuinely present, genuinely curious, genuinely good. That’s what I’m trying to be. I don’t collect certifications the way some collect credentials. I follow what’s true and integrate what I find. That orientation — toward depth rather than compliance — is the same one I bring to the work.

I believe you already have the answers within you. My job is to pay close enough attention that you can begin to find them. People often tell me I have a way of saying things that help them see themselves and what they value. I think what’s actually happening is simpler: I’m paying very close attention. To the patterns. To what keeps recurring. To what you almost said.

That quality of attention — unhurried, without agenda — is what I bring.

You bring everything else.

Lisa Soto Dunlop, LMFT #93480
MA, Integrative Counseling Psychology — CIIS
Certificate in Sex Therapy — CIIS
Licensed in California · Online Practice