Lisa Fuentes, Ph.D.

About

Lisa Fuentes, Ph.D., is a Resident in Psychology at Expand Psychology who works with children, adolescents, adults, and couples. As a bilingual Latina psychologist, she is passionate about creating a space where clients feel seen, valued, and empowered to show up as their full selves.

Dr. Fuentes strives to create a warm, collaborative, and culturally responsive environment where clients feel safe exploring difficult emotions, navigating challenges, and building meaningful change. She recognizes that our relationships, families, cultures, and lived experiences shape how we move through the world. She works alongside clients to understand patterns that may be keeping them stuck while building on the strengths they already possess.

She values creating genuine connections with her clients and believes healing happens through a combination of evidence-based treatment, self-compassion, and a strong therapeutic relationship grounded in trust, curiosity, and respect.

Specialization

Dr. Fuentes provides individual therapy, couples therapy, and psychological assessment services. She enjoys working with children, adolescents, adults, and couples navigating anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), depression, trauma, relationship concerns, life transitions, self-esteem difficulties, and identity-related challenges.

When working with children and adolescents, Dr. Fuentes partners with caregivers while helping young people build confidence, strengthen emotional awareness, and develop practical skills. She has particular experience working with anxiety, OCD, emotional regulation difficulties, and behavioral concerns.

 In couples therapy, she draws from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and the Gottman Method to help couples strengthen emotional connection, improve communication, navigate conflict more effectively, and build healthier, more secure relationships.

In addition to psychotherapy, Dr. Fuentes provides psychological assessment services, with a particular interest in ADHD evaluations and diagnostic clarification. Her goal is to help individuals and families better understand cognitive, emotional, and behavioral strengths and struggles to promote healing and inform treatment planning.

 Her therapeutic approach is collaborative and integrative, drawing from evidence-based treatments including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), and mindfulness-based approaches to help clients increase psychological flexibility and create meaningful change.

Education, Training, and Professional Experience

Dr. Fuentes earned her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). She completed her APA-accredited doctoral internship at Rutgers University Behavioral Health Care, where she provided psychotherapy and psychological assessment services to children, adolescents, and adults across a variety of clinical settings.

Throughout her training, Dr. Fuentes has worked in private practice, integrated primary care, community mental health, hospital-based settings, university counseling centers, correctional mental health, and specialty medical clinics. These experiences have allowed her to work with individuals across the lifespan presenting with anxiety, OCD, depression, trauma, chronic health conditions, behavioral concerns, and relationship difficulties.