Name: Joshua Tree Counseling
Price range: $$

Joshua Tree Counselors

Elena Flores, LMSW

Accepting New Clients

In Crisis? Call
(520) 622-6000
(800) 495-6735

Suicidal? Call
(800) 273-8255

Elena Flores is a bilingual therapist in Tucson. She is a Licensed Master Social Worker who helps clients address issues such as anxiety and depression, trauma, suicidal ideation, pregnancy and postpartum, addictive tendencies, and low self-esteem. She works with individuals, teens and their families. She will help you heal, learn, grow, and break the bonds of the past so you can live more fully in the present. Elena has a passion for helping new moms, young adults, and multi-generational households and immigrant families. She speaks Spanish and offers bilingual counseling. Learn more about counseling for teens.

Elena is under the clinical supervision of Rachel Lohrman, LPC 20943 as she works towards independent licensure.

How Elena Can Help You

Have you experienced trauma? Would you like to get to the root of why you’re getting triggered out of the blue? Are you wondering if life is really worth living or if healing is possible? Are you pregnant or a new mom and find yourself depressed or anxious? Are you and your teen struggling with connection and communication? Do you come from a multi-generational household and want a therapist who understands these complexities?

Elena specializes in helping teens and adults manage symptoms of anxiety, depression and processing through the root of these issues to better understand whether they are stemming from current stressors or childhood experiences.

Elena's Approach

Elena Flores is a compassionate, nonjudgmental and relational therapist who will meet you wherever you’re at and come alongside you on your healing journey.

She believes that therapy should be founded on comfortable communication. She’ll help you identify what is most important to you and together you’ll work towards those goals. She strives to help you with your goals in as organic a way as possible while always utilizing evidence based practices to address the underlying issues.

She offers Christian counseling when this is the client’s preference. As a licensed master social worker, Elena is experienced in helping clients from all walks of life and faith backgrounds. If faith isn’t important to you, no worries at all, she won’t include faith into counseling.

You can reach out to Elena using the links provided or send her a message.

I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Client Focus

Teens 15+
Adults 18+
Men, Women
New Moms
Immigrants

Fees/Insurance

$85 Standard Rate
$75 Reduced Rate (Limited)
Does not accept insurance
Will provide a superbill

Specialty Areas

Anxiety, Depression
Pregnancy, Postpartum
Trauma
Suicidal Ideation
Alcohol Abuse
Life Transitions
School Issues
Relationship Issues
Healthy Boundaries
Transgenerational Issues

Treatment Approaches

Acceptance and Commitment (ACT)
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
Existential
Family Systems
Motivational Interviewing
Person-Centered
Reality Therapy
Schema Therapy
Solution Focused Brief (SFBT)
Trauma-Informed
Attachment-Based
Bilingual

Credentials
AZ LMSW-17703
MSW, Master of Social Work
BA, Psychology

“Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.” --David Richo

Schema Therapy

Have you ever wondered how and why you came to believe the things you do? Would you be surprised to learn that our earlies memories/beliefs can affect our current behavior?

Schema Therapy is a method of treatment that dissects our earliest memories/beliefs about the world around us (schemas) and analyzes how these schemas affect our behaviors today. The development of schemas can be helpful in the sense that we are able to quickly analyze a social situation and adapt to it by comparing to past experiences. However, if we have experienced trauma or a limited amount of exposure to situations, our schemas can be maladaptive and cause our interpretations of new experiences to be skewed towards self preservation. Schematic therapy works using a combination of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Solution Focused Therapy (SFT), and Attachment Theory.

Trauma

Everyone’s experience of trauma is unique, even when the type of traumatic event is the same. Our biology, culture, attachment style, and personality all influence how we perceive events. Trauma therapy addresses acute, chronic, and complex trauma. Acute trauma may be a singular event like a car accident or sexual assault. Chronic and complex trauma describe the experience of individuals who have experienced multiple and prolonged events such as domestic violence, childhood abuse, addiction, bullying, neglect, and addiction.

Trauma therapy helps you get unstuck from how your brain originally stored the trauma which may include all the raw sensory data. This is why things like smell, sounds, and other cues in present time can make you feel scared, panicked, or overwhelmed – they are triggering the original memory. A trauma therapist can help you learn to recognize those triggers, stay grounded in your body, and work through the old stuff causing current distress.

Inner Child Work

We often stay stuck using the coping skills that worked well in childhood because they helped us survive – they’re all we know. And those same coping skills can get in the way in adulthood and prevent us from living a full and integrated life.

Inner child work helps identify the root of maladaptive behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs and helps us learn to reparent ourselves. Reparenting can look like learning to change our inner dialogue to be more kind, compassionate and understanding with ourselves. It can look like setting better boundaries with others because we never learned how to have good boundaries growing up. It can be processing a traumatic experience with your therapist modeling helpful and supportive things a parent or caregiver could have said to meet your need at the time.

Inner child work functions on the premise that our maladaptive behaviors are derived from unmet needs as children.

On a More Personal Note

When I am not helping clients I love to spend time with my two daughters, seeing how much they learn and grow each day. I also love spending time with my husband and our extended family, having meals together, walking, swimming, traveling, and going to church together.

I also love yoga and hope to have my certification to teach by the end of the year. I love audible books, especially thrillers and listen to murder mystery podcasts as well as Christian based podcasts when I go for walks.