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Get to know Insightful Mental Health
Insightful Mental Health is a mental health initiative that offers interventions to reduce emotional pain, create health awareness and increase wellness and growth for its clients. Insightful Mental Health is led by its founder and creator, Maria Ruiz De Toro, an experienced Licensed Mental Health Counselor and a diverse group of dedicated and culturally sensitive collaborators who provide care at different levels.
Are you experiencing difficult feelings or having a challenging moment? Take this opportunity to take care of your emotional experience and listen to yourself in a contained, safe and none-judgmental environment. You are not going to be alone in this process; we will be by your side in this inner journey. You will have an empathetic listener, customized exploration, thoughtful observations, and knowledgeable and collaborative analysis to gain insight about the most intimate parts of yourself and start the healing process.
The Work Together
Please know that one of the strengths of my work entails sorting through life events, including child history and relationships, and helping you to reframe and restructure them into healthier perceptions and positive internalized realities that promote growth. I also work on identifying your unique virtues and strengths and use them in your healing process. I used a combination of insight oriented and evidenced based techniques and I make my best effort to educate you with updated information about issues that concern your emotional and psychological life so you can have the right tools to feel well, achieve your highest potential and expand your mind.
María Ruiz De Toro
Is a bilingual English – Spanish clinical psychotherapist with experience providing mental health services to a diverse population. Maria graduated Magna Cum Laude from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, with a M.A. degree in Mental Health Counseling, and completed a five-year program in psychology from the Catholic Andres Bello University in Venezuela. She has also completed training in well-accredited educational centers in New York, including the Ackerman Institute, Hunter College, the William Alanson White Institute, St. John’s University, the Coalition of Behavioral Health Center, Roberto Clemente Center and Columbia University, among others.
In the course of her professional career, Maria has completed differential diagnosis, conducted psychological assessments, and designed and implemented individualized treatment plans to address different mental health conditions including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Mood and Anxiety disorders, and Child Onset disorders. She has experience providing individual (to children and adults), family, and couples therapy, and has helped clients to manage life transitions, acculturation challenges, and stress related issues. As an international psychotherapist, Maria has lived and traveled to different parts of the world in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. She has worked in the U.S and abroad, treating adults and children from different ethnicities and backgrounds in private clinical settings, universities, foster care systems, and refugee camps. Maria has a strong inclination for different artistic expressions, creativity and spirituality. She did in a course in fashion design at The Fashion Institute and Technology (FIT), been part of a chorus as a mezzo-soprano, practiced several dance disciplines, participated in theology conferences and spiritual experiences, She has also completed preparation in using art in the treatment room and to treat PTSD.
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in your intimacy
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a luxury but a need
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into actions and realities
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ways of feelings and thinking
“Nobody knows your intimate self, better than you do. Be brave and allow me to be by your side in this in this transformational healing process.”
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“Reflections without actions are condemned to oblivion”
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“What is to give light must endure burning.”
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“Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.”
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“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
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“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
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“To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.”
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“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
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“I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”
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“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion”
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“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course, this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”
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“But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
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“I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.”
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“People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”
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“…Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.”
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“If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”
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“Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.”
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I strongly believe that integration of different disciplines can nurture development in all dimensions. Therefore, I work with a diverse and culturally sensitive team of collaborators to fulfill my clients individualized needs, including medical doctors, personal stylists, fashion designers, personal organizers, musicians, nutritionists, spiritual and cultural advisers, and legal and immigrations experts.
“I have always given an important place to creative expression in the healing process.”