About
- Attachment work
- DBT skills
- Mindfulness tools
About Carey
Carey Alvord is an LMFT - Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California with 23 years of clinical experience. She focuses on stress, anxiety, family concerns, parenting, trauma and abuse, and compassion fatigue. Carey works with parents, teens, and adults who want to understand attachment, childhood loss, or developmental trauma and how these affect relationships at home.
She often helps biological, foster, adoptive, and relative parents who are open to attachment-based parenting work. Carey also supports teens and adults exploring their attachment patterns after loss or trauma. Her approach is practical and direct, aimed at understanding repeated patterns and making small changes that influence daily family life.
Carey blends attachment-based ideas with mindfulness and narrative techniques to help people notice what’s happening in relationships. She uses Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills for emotion regulation and motivational interviewing to support change. Sessions typically include clear structure, reflection, and concrete behavioral steps to try between meetings.
Her background includes long experience with developmental trauma, parent-child relationships, and adoption and foster care issues. She names attachment, dissociation, blended family challenges, caregiver stress, fertility and immigration concerns among areas she addresses. That breadth informs how she reads family patterns and offers practical strategies.
People who come to Carey will find focused sessions that look at how past relationships shape present choices. She aims to help clients reduce distress and improve day-to-day interactions at home through skills, stories, and attention to attachment dynamics.
How sessions work
How Carey’s approaches translate to online work
Carey frequently uses Attachment-Based Therapy to look at how early relationships affect current patterns. This approach focuses on connection and how people respond under stress, helping clients notice habits in parent-child and adult relationships.She also uses Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills to teach concrete emotion regulation and distress tolerance techniques. These skills are useful for managing high stress, anxiety, and reactive moments at home. Mindfulness Therapy is another part of her work and helps people practice present-moment awareness, which supports calmer responses in daily family life.
Choosing the right approach is part of the work together. Carey will discuss your goals, needs, and preferences and recommend which methods to prioritize. She frames this as collaborative planning rather than a fixed prescription.
Confirm the specific online session options before booking since formats are not listed in the profile. Online work can make it easier to fit sessions into weekdays or evenings, avoid travel time, and allow shorter check-ins when needed. Therapists can use structured skills teaching, guided reflections, and behavioral homework just as they do in person, which helps translate practice into real life at home.
Areas of focus
Areas of expertise
Primary focus
Additional focus areas
Therapeutic approaches
Experience
23+ years
Listed in
California
Languages
English
Questions
Frequently asked questions
What kinds of family or parenting concerns does she help with?
She works with stress, anxiety, parenting, attachment issues, abandonment, adoption and foster care concerns, blended family challenges, and caregiver stress.
What is her general therapy style?
Carey uses an open yet structured approach that mixes attachment-based ideas, DBT skills, mindfulness, motivational interviewing, and narrative methods to help clients change patterns.
How much clinical experience does she have?
She has 23 years of professional experience working with developmental trauma and parent-child relationship issues.
What are her credentials and where is she based?
She holds the LMFT credential and is licensed in California.
Does she see clients in other languages or internationally?
Sessions are offered in English and she is not currently accepting international clients.
Which session formats are offered?
Please confirm the current session formats before booking, as the profile does not list specific formats.
How does her pricing work?
Cost varies with location; sessions use a subscription model that can be canceled at any time.
How do I begin a first session?
Select the See online therapy options button, complete a short matching questionnaire, and schedule your first session.
Details come from information the therapist supplied to BetterHelp. A license can be checked with the state board.
Online talk therapy is not emergency care. If anyone is in danger, use the crisis numbers.