Tanya Salazar, LPC, ART

Life can feel like walking a tightrope—balancing pressures, expectations, and the quiet shame we’ve been taught to carry alone.There is no “right way” to move through it all. No perfect formula for balance. You are the alchemist of your own life; the truth of who you are and how you want to lead your life already lives within you

As an Art Therapist and Licensed Professional Counselor, I offer a gentle, curious space where you don’t have to figure everything out. My approach is rooted in a studio-based model that integrates art psychotherapy to support self-discovery, resilience, and deeper understanding. I specialize in fostering unapologetic emotional expression through creative processes in individual and group settings with children, adolescents, and adults. Through an eclectic and collaborative lens, I help you examine and rebuild trust in your own footing—crafting a net strong enough to hold you when the line feels too thin to walk alone. 

Art therapy holds a unique power to speak when words fall short. Art-making allows us to express what has been buried, blurred, or hard to name. Through creative processes, we weave together body awareness, emotional exploration, and imaginative play to uncover internal strengths and illuminate protective emotions that rarely get center stage. There is no age limit, artistic skill, or “right way” to create here. Together, we can paint, draw, scribble, sculpt—or even destroy—as an act of reclaiming agency. I am devoted to nurturing your inner artist with compassion, while gently tending to your inner critic.

In our work, we will slowly unstitch old narratives and weave new ones—stories that honor where you’ve been and who you are becoming. Any step toward knowing yourself is enough. My approach is grounded in the belief that healing happens through relationship—both the relationship you build with yourself and the one we cultivate together, a creative a space where you can feel, imagine, unlearn, and remember—where you can reconnect with the parts of yourself that have been silenced and find balance in cultivating a sense of wholeness that feels true to you.

I pull from a relational model, IFS, somatic techniques, emotion-focused practices, attachment theory, and feminist and queer theory. As a first-generation Mexican American and queer clinician, I understand the ache of not seeing yourself fully reflected in the world. I work from an anti-oppressive, trauma-informed, and relational lens that seeks to decolonize learned patterns and honor both the stories you carry and the ones you are still learning to speak. While I can’t walk the tightrope for you, I can tend to it with you, braiding its fibers, steadying it sway, testing its tension and strength for your steps to feel less like fear and more like possibility, reminding you that net beneath you is not to catch your “failure” but to hold you steady in your practice.