Margarita Araiza-Johnston, LCSW

Margarita Araiza-Johnston is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with ten years of experience. She practices in New Mexico and speaks English and Spanish. Her work includes family and parenting concerns, depression, grief, anxiety, anger, relationship and intimacy issues, and career coaching.

She trained in social work after earning a BA in sociology and anthropology with a minor in French. She completed a Master of Social Work at Tulane University. Early roles included hospice social work and crisis and suicide counseling in Louisiana, which shaped her skills in assessment and crisis response.

Margarita has experience working with child abuse and neglect cases and with family systems. She also completed programs in mediation and family law mediation, which inform how she talks through conflict and decision points with people. Her background includes bilingual therapy and work supporting LGBTQ+ concerns.

In sessions she draws on approaches that focus on relationships, emotions, and practical problem solving. That means looking at how attachment patterns, thoughts, and emotional responses affect day-to-day life. She uses straightforward techniques to identify unhelpful patterns and try different ways of responding.

People come to her for help managing stress, coping with life changes, navigating separation or divorce, and addressing complicated grief or shame. She also works with concerns like codependency, communication problems, control issues, and compassion fatigue. Clients can expect clear discussion of goals and steps to try between sessions.

How her approaches translate to online work