BIO

FABRICE PARACUELLOS

I am a psychotherapist licensed in the state of California (LMFT114054) and New Jersey (37FI 00230800) and the Clinical Director of the Center for Self Welcoming Therapy. I help individuals, families, teams, and organizations heal emotions, relationships, develop self-love, and culture. I also taught the practice of psychotherapy to graduate students and supervise psychotherapists in training.

I was raised in Paris and spent my summers in Brittany. I remember enjoying math and physics growing up. As a result, I studied engineering. I also studied business administration and got an M.S. in Engineering and an MBA, having studied at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, HEC Paris, ESADE (Spain), Arts et Métiers ParisTech, and Denmark Technical University. I worked at Verizon, Cap Gemini, and founded two startups. 

The birth of my two children has been the most meaningful event in my life. When my daughter was born I remember asking myself about how to bring meaning in my professional life. I had enjoyed my corporate work but felt that something was missing. At that time I briefly contemplated becoming a psychotherapist. I had received therapy in my late teens and had found that encounter profoundly meaningful, but implicitly ruled this career out (in retrospect rightfully, as I believe I was not mature enough then).

Instead, I turned to the study of life from a geopolitical perspective after having read a book on diplomacy by a former U.S. Secretary of State. I took international affairs classes at the Johns Hopkins University and then studied at the University of California, Irvine the causes of war. I became interested in what was the only empirically-validated statement in the field of international relations (to my knowledge): that liberal democracies do not go to war against each other. I ended up wondering how this type of political organization comes to life and I became interested in culture, how it gets constituted, its attributes, its effects on its members and on others, and its evolution. 

I had first discovered culture in my travels. It is when I left my home country for the first time that I became actually aware that culture existed, other than at an intellectual level. Prior to that, it had been so pervasive that I had no felt awareness of its existence (or power). The descriptions of culture I came across, however, did not account for the human complexity as I had experienced it in the countries I lived in. So I looked where I thought would be enough complexity: psychology and complexity theory.

What I found, in addition to answering my questions about culture, was purpose. I realized that I had actually come to psychology because I felt ready, and also because I love being a dad, because I love providing what I think all of us should receive growing up, myself included, and through life: the continued experience of being deeply listened to, appreciated, and being provided with the tools that we need to grow and shine.

My psychotherapy practice includes elements of psycho-education, psychodynamic approaches, Jungian psychology, attachment theory, emotionally focused therapy (EFT), person-centered approach, gestalt, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), EMDR, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and mindfulness as a function of what is called for. I am also a trained yoga nidra mindfulness meditation instructor. I completed my psychotherapist training with an emphasis in depth psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara.