About Janeth Nuñez del Prado, LCSW
I am a clinician, Motivational Interviewing trainer, consultant, and educator with more than fifteen years of experience working with people navigating trauma, change, relationships, and uncertainty.
Across very different settings, I have found myself drawn to the same questions: What helps people feel understood? What helps them make sense of what they have lived through? What allows change to become possible without taking away autonomy?
Those questions have shaped both my clinical work and the way I teach.
The Way I Learned to Listen
I was born into a Bolivian family where stories did not always arrive in straight lines.
Meaning could live in memory, humor, family history, silence, metaphor, or in something understood without ever being directly said. That way of making sense of people stayed with me.
It taught me to listen beyond the presenting problem and to remain curious about the larger story: what happened, what survived, what was inherited, what still protects, what gives strength, and what may now be ready to change.
That perspective continues to shape my work with clients and professionals today.
My Clinical Foundation
I earned my Master’s degree in Social Work from UC Berkeley and completed post-graduate clinical training at the UCSF Child Trauma Research Center, where my early work centered on trauma, attachment, and the impact of adversity on children and families.
Over time, my clinical work expanded across the lifespan and across settings. I have worked with complex trauma, relational wounds, behavioral health concerns, justice-impacted individuals, and people navigating systems that do not always understand the complexity of their lives.
I have also worked within criminal defense and civil rights settings and served as an expert witness in legal proceedings.
These experiences taught me how deeply human behavior is shaped by relationship, context, culture, power, fear, belonging, and the ways people learn to survive.
Why Motivational Interviewing
Motivational Interviewing eventually gave language and structure to many of the things I had already come to value in clinical work: curiosity, collaboration, respect for autonomy, careful listening, and the understanding that ambivalence often contains important information.
I am a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), and MI is now central to both my teaching and my clinical thinking.
I am especially interested in what happens when MI is taken beyond the microskills and brought into conversation with trauma, attachment, ethics, culture, metaphor, and meaning-making.
That is where much of my current teaching lives.
How I Teach
My trainings are highly experiential and clinically grounded.
I combine practical skill-building with storytelling, reflective practice, real-play, metaphor, and deidentified clinical vignettes drawn from the people and families I have worked with over the years.
I want learners to leave with language and skills they can use immediately. I also want them to leave thinking differently about ambivalence, autonomy, relationship, and their own role in helping people change.
For me, the most meaningful training does both.
My Clinical Practice Today
Alongside my training and consultation work, I maintain a small psychotherapy practice focused on adults healing from complex PTSD, relational trauma, attachment wounds, and difficult early experiences.
My practice has a particular interest in people whose lives have also been shaped by culture, identity, marginalization, or systems involvement, including Latine and justice-impacted communities.
I provide services in English and Spanish.
What Connects My Work
Whether I am teaching a room of clinicians, sitting with someone healing from complex trauma, or consulting with a professional trying to understand a difficult situation, I return to many of the same questions:
What is this person trying to protect?
What matters to them?
What meaning are they making of what has happened?
And what becomes possible when they feel deeply understood?
That is the thread running through my work.
Capacitación, consulta y servicios clínicos disponibles en inglés y español.
Background & Training
My early clinical training centered on trauma, attachment, and the ways adversity shapes development, relationships, and meaning across the lifespan. 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 leading 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, attachment, and resilience 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 remain vigilant, and the parts that continue reaching toward something different. I approach complexity with curiosity and respect for the adaptations that helped a person survive.
Motivational Interviewing became a natural extension of that clinical foundation. I am a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), and MI now sits at the center of much of my clinical thinking, teaching, and consultation. At its core, MI asks us to meet ambivalence with curiosity, listen closely for what matters to a person, respect autonomy, and help people access their own reasons and resources for change.
I am especially interested in what happens when MI is brought into conversation with trauma, attachment, culture, identity, ethics, metaphor, and meaning-making. These intersections shape the trainings I develop and the questions I continue to explore as a clinician and educator.
Over the course of my career, I have provided psychotherapy across the lifespan in clinical and community settings, worked extensively with complex trauma and marginalized populations, served as an expert witness in legal proceedings, and trained behavioral health professionals, attorneys, and interdisciplinary teams. My experience also includes embedded clinical work within criminal defense and civil rights settings, giving me a close view of how trauma, culture, systems, power, and human behavior intersect outside the therapy room.
Today, my work brings these threads together: clinical depth, Motivational Interviewing, reflective practice, culture, and a sustained curiosity about how people heal, make meaning, and move toward change.
A Unique Perspective
Real-World Experience
Criminal defense and civil rights
Expert witness work
Organizational consultation
Ethics
High-stakes decision-making
Clinical Depth
Complex trauma
Attachment
Motivational Interviewing
Meaning-making
Human complexity
