Jordana DiVento MPH, NBC-HWC, KYT
Marriage and Family Therapist Trainee
Supervised by Martena Rachel Wilson, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist LMFT #133052
Education in Progress
Master of Science, Clinical Psychology, Notre Dame De Namur University
Non-Clinical Education
- Master of Public Health
- National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach
- Kripalu Yoga Teacher
- Reiki Master and Teacher
About Me
I am a good match for people seeking depth of understanding, humor, and relatability in a therapist. My interpersonal style is playful and encouraging when appropriate, and quietly attuned with openness and compassion in tender moments.
I help people who
- invest in personal growth.
- want to improve communication.
- are trying to make a relationship, goal, or situation work, but it's not getting better.
- need help regulating the body and mind.
- need help through slow healing phases.
If you're wondering whether I will relate to you, the answer is probably "yes." The history of my life path is diverse and varied, and it hasn't been linear. I've walked many roads and arrive at this work with considerable life experience.
My perspective always includes how cultural, social, environmental, genetic, political, symbolic, and ancestral influences contribute to individual experience. Working with me will likely bring these topics into our conversations.
Life presents innumerable chosen and unchosen experiences; limitations and liberations; deep sorrows and great joys. I welcome the opportunity to work alongside you to navigate these complexities.
Personal notes:
- I have two dogs (dachshund and sheepadoodle) and love animals.
- I am in progress with turning my yards into native plant scapes.
- After decades of "not knowing how to make art" and "not being good at art," I am using YouTube and Instagram tutorials to develop art-making as a hobby.
See Background and Identity Statements for, yes, more writing and information.
How I can help you
Career
- Career and Workplace Values Alignment
- Job Change
- Leadership Quality
- New Leadership Role
- Work-Related Burnout
Family Structure
- Blending + Stepparenting
- Expansive + ENM/CNM Relationships
- Family Disengagement + Estrangement
- Gender Gaps, Invisible Labor, and Mental Load
- Platonic Life Partnership
Health
- Autoimmune and Chronic Conditions
- Burnout
- Chronic and Trauma-Related Stress
- Sexual and Reproductive Health
Relationship and Parenting Transitions
- Divorce
- Stages of Parenting Children Under 12
- Grief and Loss
- Perinatal Depression, Anxiety, and Trauma
Spiritual
- Existential Inquiry
- Integration
- Preparation
My clinical approaches
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Informs how early bonds with caregivers shape relationship patterns.
Treats problematic actions as learned habits that can be unlearned and replaced with healthier ones.
Combines biological, psychological, and social factors to understand overall mental health and wellbeing.
Explores life's universal anxieties, including meaning, freedom, isolation, and mortality.
Examines how social structures, oppression, and cultural identity impact mental health and well-being.
Focuses on a person's innate potential for growth through empathy and self-acceptance.
Uncovers how childhood experiences and the unconscious mind shape present behaviors. Significant emphasis is placed upon working with defense mechanisms, inner conflict, and navigating the connections between social rules, values, and personal motivations.
States that actions, stress, and behaviors of one member affect the entire group, and can perpetuate relational patterns and multi-generational dynamics. It explains human behavior, communication breakdowns, and emotional health within the family.
How we can work together
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Encourages accepting difficult emotions while committing to values-based actions.
Non-verbal, creative self-expression is a form of language capable of revealing unconscious truths and organizing internal chaos. It does not require artistic ability or talent.
Identifies and changes negative thought and behavioral patterns. Places significant emphasis on small, incremental behavior change through systematic structure.
Teaches mindfulness, distress tolerance, and emotional regulation skills.
Identifies relationship pursue and withdraw dynamics rooted in unmet needs that often began in early life. Partners work together to build a more securely attached relationship that has greater capacity for working together. Partners also learn about the underlying emotions and triggers that escalate conflict cycles.
All members work together in identifying the way that hidden roles and behaviors create healthy and dysfunctional patterns within the family. Family members discover relational and emotional ties within the system that contribute to unresolved, entrenched problems.
Identifies and heals different internal "parts" to experience internal harmony and wholeness.
Supporting physical sensations and perceptions to generate internal felt safety and healing. This is a strong modality for improving self-regulation, integrating body and mind, and developing trusting confidence in one's intrinsic capacity to heal.
Background
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Clients can trust that I understand and know how to work with the burnout that comes from emotional, energetic, and time-related burdens of work.
I am uniquely qualified to work with folks experiencing workplace burnout through my work at Stanford. Outside of academic healthcare, my expertise in burnout remains widely useful in supporting clients through the current labor market and the realities of today's workplace.
At Stanford, I coauthored research on reducing burnout and increasing well-being for healthcare professionals. I also introduced Compassion science-based support for clinical and non-clinical teams addressing the emotional, energetic, and time burdens of professional caregiving. Growth mindset and positive psychology interventions were also part of my services, but only applied when consistently positive team relationships were in place.
I bring a broader perspective to how workplace burnout develops through barriers involving work volume, control over schedule, efficiency, leadership quality, organizational and personal values alignment, personal resilience, and organizational culture.
My background in public health helps me understand and assess the larger social and cultural influences that affect your health, well-being, risks, and access to resources.
A Masters of Public Health is a professional graduate degree focusing on improving population health by addressing social, environmental, and behavioral factors.
I am an expert on what it takes to generate the best possible health for the largest number of people possible. This is called population health.
I know that the health of an individual person is substantially influenced by community, state, region, and country, in addition to biological, social, and psychological determinants.
Public Health Specialties
- Making health information easy to understand.
- Making healthcare systems more effective.
- Designing clinical and social health programs.
- Reproductive and sexual health.
- Aging.
This is the most rigorous credential in the field of coaching.
Although coaching is not a licensed medical or clinical credential, I am certified to work in clinical settings under the supervision of licensed healthcare professionals, which I did while working at Stanford's adult and children's hospitals.
I successfully qualified for and passed the certification exam for health and wellness coaches, which is overseen by the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME). The NBME is the same board that oversees exams for multiple clinical professions, including medical students.
Coaching is not therapy. Coaches cannot treat or diagnose medical conditions. Any coaching that I facilitate takes place outside of therapeutic settings.
The major highlight of my coaching experience is the emphasis on skill practice and pursuing specific time-bound goals. Coaching clients design their goals independently and the coach provides the structure that leads to goal achievement.
Regardless of the setting, I am sensitive to client goals and providing the right framework for reaching them. Coaching training also enhanced my significant expertise in the realm of health and wellness.
Health and Wellness Coaching Competencies
- Preserving client autonomy.
- Maintaining a non-judgmental working relationship at all times.
- Holding feelings of low motivation.
- Addressing discord in real time.
- Creating a hopeful and meaningful goal vision.
- Flexible goal planning.
- Practicing behavioral shifts that are tiny steps or big leaps.
- Sustaining accountability agreements.
I was accepted for in-person residential training at the Kripalu Center, one of the major yoga hubs from the 1970s and endures today.
Prior to yoga teacher training, I spent time at Fo Guang Shan monastery in Taiwan. These two experiences heavily influence my understanding of mindfulness, meditation, awareness, insight, and compassion.
Kripalu Tenets
- Allow practice to become meditation in motion.
- Compassion for self and others.
- Daily practice in asana or meditation.
- Prana is life force connected to the breath, which vivifies the body, expands consciousness, sharpens perception, and awakens the spirit.
- Respect and honor each person's unique discovery and expression of life.
- Self-observation.
- Service.
- Walk the path of love.
- Willfully sustaining and deepening practice.
Immersing myself in the field of anthropology constituted the most unique and enlightening pathway to examining the human experience.
Through anthropology, I understand why and how people share and create culture. I always consider cultural influences on the individual experience, which includes the collective past and present. Anthropology also helps me incorporate history, myth, philosophy, and symbolism into therapeutic work.
Focus Areas
- Forensics.
- Medical culture of health and disease.
- Sexual and reproductive health policy.
- Domestic and global gender health disparities.
Identity Statements
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I have been fully or partially able-bodied throughout my life while managing several challenging chronic conditions. My familiarity with long-term caregiving began in childhood, when I functioned as the primary caretaker of a parent with severe chronic severe mental health conditions.
As for cognitive and relational abilities, I manage ADHD and autism. Similar to many other therapists, the long-term consequences from my personal traumatic experiences have overshadowed my ability in different ways at different times.
I am primarily of European ancestry: Central, Western, and the U.K. I am connected to Gaulish people, Celtic people, Coptic Egyptians, scholars, monastics, and river, forest, and Alpine dwellers.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest among white, Southeast Asian, and Coastal and Puget Sound tribal communities. Amerindian culture and history were visible and prevalent in my K–12 education and in the wider community through events, outreach, and powwows. I also lived for several years in rural Eastern Washington.
Beyond Washington, I have lived in Oregon, California, the Washington, D.C. metro area, and Colorado. While living in the D.C. metro area, I attended George Mason University, which was ranked as one of the most diverse universities in the United States.
Today, my community is diverse by choice and includes people with a wide range of backgrounds and lived experiences.
I have lived across economic lines, from poverty to greater privilege. These experiences shape my awareness of social mobility, class, and the structural barriers to them. I know that the line between having and not having is thin.
I recognize that the American dream remains out of reach for many people despite doing the things that are proclaimed to attain it.
Education is one area of significant privilege in my life. From a young age, I dedicated myself to growth through learning and knowledge-seeking, which has guided me in pursuing multiple degrees, certifications, and specialized trainings. I am well-read, with broad knowledge across many domains.
Scientific methods are important to my practice because they support evidence-based care. At the same time, I understand that current findings are not always definitive truths; they evolve over time and often contain significant gaps that fail to capture personal and anecdotal experience.
I am an open and expansive thinker, and therefore sensitive to the nuances that material science misses via scientific privilege, narrow perspective, or pending technological advancement.
I live and work on the land of the Raymatush Ohlone people, and more specifically the Urebure, who are the original stewards of the San Francisco Peninsula. They were among the first Indigenous peoples in this region to be displaced and forced into labor by the Mission system, which few survived. I also live in close proximity to a sacred mountain that is the largest and oldest Indigenous burial ground and ceremonial site in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I was born into the Mormon religion, which was unusual in my case because my family system did not reflect its culture or norms. I did not practice the faith as intensively as what is considered standard. Early in life, I identified as a spiritual seeker and went on to explore many other religious, spiritual, and philosophical systems. Today, I consider myself spiritual and remain interested in consciousness, religious and spiritual history, mysticism, mythology, esoterica and metaphysics, and the development of intuition.
Jordana DiVento, Marriage and Family Therapist Trainee