About Maria
Maria Clara Salazar-Pretto is a licensed clinical social worker with 20 years of experience helping people who feel overwhelmed, stuck, or exhausted. She speaks English and Spanish and aims to make conversations straightforward and respectful so clients can focus on next steps. She uses a client-centered, goal-focused way of working.
Sessions are practical and hands-on. Maria Clara often uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to notice unhelpful thinking and learn new coping skills.
Background and approach
She also draws on Solution-Focused ideas to set clear, short-term goals. Her experience spans hospitals, health centers, and personal agencies. She has worked with young adults through senior adults and brings that range into each session.
Her training includes a master’s degree in social work from California State University, Fresno, and an undergraduate degree in clinical psychology. In sessions she emphasizes validation, active listening, and gentle challenge. Conversations are aimed at helping people regulate strong emotions, improve relationships, and manage everyday stress.
Topics she commonly addresses include anxiety, depression, grief, trauma and abuse, ADHD, parenting, intimacy-related concerns, and work stress. Clients who appreciate clear tools and steady support often do well with her style. She offers help in both English and Spanish and works with people from diverse cultural backgrounds.
The focus is on small, practical steps that fit each person's life and goals.
Practical approaches for online therapy and skill building
Maria Clara often uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people identify unhelpful thoughts and develop coping skills for anxiety, depression, ADHD, and stress. CBT focuses on noticing patterns, testing new behaviors, and building routines that reduce distress.She also uses Solution-Focused Therapy to set short-term, achievable goals and build momentum. This approach is useful when someone wants clear steps and quick ways to measure progress toward specific life or relationship goals.
Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Maria Clara will listen to your goals and preferences, try methods that fit your needs, and adjust the plan based on what helps you most. Together you decide which tools to keep, change, or add as work progresses.
Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat, or text-based messaging to make attendance easier around work, school, or caregiving. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and nonverbal cues, phone sessions can be a good shorter check-in, and messaging formats provide ongoing support between meetings. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life while focusing on clear skills and practical change.
Questions people ask
What issues does she commonly address?
What is her therapy style like?
How much experience does she have?
What are her credentials and where is she based?
Can sessions be conducted in other languages?
What session formats are available?
How does payment and cost work?
How do I begin working with her?
What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Blended family issues
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Eating and food-related issues
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- Florida
- Languages
- English, Spanish
We will earn a commission if you sign up through our link, at no cost to you.