Lisa Marie Anzaldua

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Training

Lisa is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and a seasoned couples coaching professional. Her expertise results from being trained by Tony Robbins & Cloe Madanes as a certified life coach, her graduate-level education in Marriage and Family Therapy (Delta Kappa Pi), and her undergrad in Transpersonal Psychology. Cloe Madanes is one of the originators of the strategic therapy approach and founded the Family Therapy Institute of Washington, D.C., and the Family Therapy Center of Maryland. Her pioneering work laid the foundation of many of the most effective approaches and techniques used in couples therapy. Tony Robbins is a successful personal development and peak performance strategy company globally.

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Life Experience

Beyond formal education, Lisa understands the effort involved in building a fulfilling relationship as she has been married for 18 years to someone from a different culture and race than her own. She is also a mom of two boys - 11 & 16. 

 

Furthermore, having the experience of personally overcoming significant adversity, ranging from childhood homelife extreme dysfunction and anorexia, Lisa is equipped with wisdom and an ability to guide her clients from their interpersonal, intrapsychic, or circumstantial distress to their desired outcomes. Lisa's coaching competency also includes working with couples to overcome feelings of being stuck in helplessness or overwhelm, whether relative to their relationships or other life goals. Additional areas of focus are conscious parenting and helping women successfully navigate relationship difficulties with partners who do not actively participate in the couples' coaching process. 

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Couples Coaching Approach

Lisa's couples coaching is rooted in attachment science (derived from the scientific theory of human development relative to bonding compatible with emotional processing neuroscience). Lisa provides a safe and judgment-free space, ensuring that each partner feels equally validated and supported. Her ability to make couples feel at ease comes from a deep understanding that we all can get caught up in coping mechanisms that may have been very helpful in the past but no longer serve us. She works with her clients to uncover vulnerabilities, fundamental needs, and core beliefs and guides them in cultivating new constructive habits of relating. This approach leads couples to re-establish closeness, admiration, and respect for one another.

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Neurodiverse Couples

Lisa's competence revolves around couples coaching rooted in attachment science (derived from the scientific theory of human development relative to bonding compatible with emotional processing neuroscience). Neurodiverse couples often struggle to feel "attached" to each other. Lisa patiently works with the couple to break down misunderstandings and assumptions made about each other so deep attachment can be built. 

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Blended Families

With blended families, Lisa is aware of the most significant challenges created by stepfamily architecture and considers three levels of solutions to these challenges— psychoeducational, interpersonal, and intrapsychic/family-­ of-­ origin work. In helping the parents navigate their own and their children's new life, she informs parents about how children in stepfamilies struggle with losses, loyalty binds, and change—encouraging them to nurture healthy attachment bonds with their children. Parents in stepfamilies may need help providing the empathic, compassionate presence that is so dysregulating for distressed children.

She considers the most common and significant challenges to bonding and connection among family members. One challenge is that stepparents can feel like outsiders. Blended family structure often polarizes the adults around parenting tasks. Lisa works with these parents in forging a new family culture in the company of at least already established cultures.

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Affair Recovery

Lisa helps couples heal from the pain of affairs and any degree of betrayal, providing solace and recovery. A secure bond is synonymous with mutual emotional accessibility and responsiveness. Lisa helps the couple make sense of the affair, deal with their emotions, work through the task of forgiveness, and recreate trust. Lisa helps them work with and through painful emotions relative to rejection and abandonment and uses them to create specific kinds of responsive healing interactions.

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LGBTQ

Additionally, Lisa provides coaching for the LGBTQ couples. She understands the prejudice and discrimination presented to them (from their families and society, personal and impersonal) and the challenges with forming adequate support systems. Her approach is LGB-affirmative  — countering oppressive messaging and not reinforcing the ordinary negative judgments of society.

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Interracial and Intercultural 

Lisa also works with interracial and other intercultural couples in exploring how these factors influence the way they interact, communicate, and other influence family relations. 

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Publications

Lisa is the author of Inner Sanctum: Your Most Empowering Resource which offers a way to understand how one's past directly or symbolically influences their present and how to capitalize on this so they may live according to truth, the present, and their desired future. This book provides insight beyond most personal development books and details a precise process for rapid life-changing results. It guides readers in uncovering the source of undesirable patterns and habits in their relationships - and precisely what to do about it. It teaches the reader to expand their personal locus of control and emphasizes the capacity for transformation through deep self-reflection, healing unresolved emotional memories, tapping into the unconscious when necessary, and transcending the ego. She provides a free copy to all of her clients.  

 

Lisa has several articles on Medium.com and E-Course on Udemy. Her website is www.DesignedEmpowerment.com

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Specialties

• General Couples Coaching

• Neurodiversity

• Affair Recovery

• Blended Family

• LGBTQ

• Family Conflict

• Interracial and Intercultural Couples

• Life Transitions

• Men’s issues

• Parenting/ Co-parenting

• Parent-Adolescent conflict
   

Clients

Couples and individuals 

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License

Registered Associate, MFTA #132097

Supervised by Dr. Harry Motro, LMFT #53452

Employed by New Path Couples Therapy Inc.

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Contact

couplescoachingspecialist@gmail.com

Phone: 858-537-7828

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