About Me

Javier E. Garcia is a licensed psychotherapist in the state of California with a Master’s degree in Social Work with an emphasis on Children and Families. He currently serves as a Clinical Supervisor and Director of Mental Health for a nonprofit agency in Riverside, California. Javier provides psychotherapy to children, families, couples, and individual adults, and offers services in English and Spanish, with limited proficiency in Nahuatl.

Javier specializes in trauma treatment and high-acuity mental health care, including eating disorders, suicidality, homicidality, psychosis, and self-injurious behaviors. His clinical training includes EMDR (Certified Therapist and an EMDR Consultant-in-Training), Somatic Experiencing® (Somatic Experiencing Partitioner), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) for OCD, Ego-State therapies such as Internal Family Systems (IFS), advanced grief counseling, personality disorder treatment, and clinical hypnotherapy as a National Board Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist.

His trauma work spans a wide range of presentations, including single-incident trauma, complex trauma, developmental and pre-verbal trauma, intergenerational and transgenerational trauma, and systemic traumas such as racism and neocolonialism. He also has extensive experience working in affirming and inclusive mental health settings serving LGBTQ2S+ communities.
Javier holds a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and integrates anthropological and cultural perspectives into his clinical work. He regularly provides workshops on Indigenous cultural practices and mental health, with a particular focus on bridging Western clinical models with ancestral healing traditions through an Indigenous-informed psychotherapy framework. He has guest lectured at California State University, Los Angeles on the topic of Decolonizing Psychotherapy and volunteers with Nahuatl-speaking organizations, offering community workshops on mental health, intergenerational trauma, and culturally grounded approaches to healing.

Javier identifies as macehualli, a Nahuatl term referring to Indigenous people, derived from macehualtin, meaning “person” or “human.” He is also part of the Nahua community, referring to people who speak the Nahuatl language, one of the Indigenous languages of Mesoamerica within the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family.

In addition to his clinical and community work, Javier enjoys spending time with his family, is happily married and his seven schnauzers. He finds meaning in cultural practices such as drumming the huehuetl and cultivating his milpa, which he considers sacred ways of connecting with nuestros viejos abuelos—the ancestral generations that came before us.