About Janeth Nuñez del Prado, LCSW
For more than fifteen years, I've worked alongside people facing some of the most psychologically demanding moments of their lives — not from a distance, but close in, where the pressure is real and the stakes are not abstract.
My work lives where clinical depth meets the actual texture of people's lives. The people who find their way to me are rarely struggling in quiet, contained ways. They are navigating active legal situations, carrying the weight of work that asks everything of them, or trying to hold themselves together while the ground beneath them is still shifting.
What I bring to that is more than clinical training — though the training is deep. It is a genuine fluency in the systems that shape my clients' lives: the legal process, the institutional pressures, the ways that culture and community and family history show up in how people carry stress, make meaning, and find their way back to themselves.
I was born into a Bolivian family where stories didn't arrive in straight lines — they came in fragments, in accumulation, in the spaces between what was said and what was understood. That inheritance lives in how I practice. I don't impose a linear path on a nonlinear experience. I follow the story as it actually arrives.
I work in English and Spanish, and I bring the same quality of attention to both.
If you've landed here, something in your life is likely demanding more than you expected to give. You don't have to figure out what that means alone.
Who I Work With
My work is especially relevant for individuals who are:
Navigating legal cases or high-stakes life circumstances
People navigating trauma alongside an active legal case
Professionals operating in demanding, high-pressure environments
Background & Training
My clinical foundation was built in environments that didn't allow for abstraction. I hold a Master's degree in Social Work from UC Berkeley and completed post-graduate clinical training at the UCSF Child Trauma Research Center — one of the country's foremost programs in early trauma, attachment, and the long arc of how adverse experience shapes a life. I trained under Dr. Alicia Lieberman and Dr. Patricia Van Horn, whose work on the relationship between trauma, loss, and resiliency remains foundational to how I understand people across the lifespan.
That training taught me to look underneath the presenting problem — to stay curious about what a person is carrying beneath what is visible, and to trust that even the most complicated presentations have an interior logic worth understanding. Over time, that orientation deepened into a genuine interest in the internal landscape: the parts of a person that protect, the parts that grieve, the parts that keep showing up even when someone has tried everything to quiet them. I don't pathologize complexity. I work with it.
I am also an expert in Motivational Interviewing (MI) — not as a set of techniques to deploy, but as a relational philosophy. MI, at its core, is about meeting the ambivalent parts of a person with curiosity rather than pressure. It is about helping to empower people to access the protective parts of themselves that they may not see. That framework has shaped how I work across every context, from individual therapy to high-stakes legal settings to professional training.
Over the course of my career I have provided therapy across the lifespan in clinical and community settings, served as an expert witness in legal proceedings, and trained attorneys, public defenders, and behavioral health professionals in trauma-informed practice, the human cost of high-stakes work, and the art of working with people who are not sure they want help. I currently serve as the embedded clinical social worker at a criminal defense and civil rights law firm — a role that keeps my understanding of the legal system not theoretical, but lived.
My work now sits exactly where psychological insight and real-world context have to align. That is not a niche I fell into. It is where I have always been headed.
A Unique Perspective
Clinical Depth
Complex trauma
Attachment
Motivational Interviewing
Meaning-making
Human complexity
Real-World Experience
Criminal defense and civil rights
Expert witness work
Organizational consultation
Ethics
High-stakes decision-making
High-stakes situations place a real psychological demand on how you think, decide, and function.
You don’t have to carry this alone.
También ofrezco servicios en español para quienes prefieren expresarse en su idioma—porque sentirse comprendido realmente importa.
Fees for individual therapy are based on session format and may be covered by insurance or provided as private pay.
Please contact me to discuss current rates and options.