Julian Cabezas, LCSW

Psychotherapist · California & New York · he/him

The people who most need to understand relationships often learned about them earliest — in rooms where even those who had language couldn't get it out of their bodies, couldn't share it without it landing wrong, couldn't recognize when it was time to speak at all.

That observation is where this practice began.

Julian grew up spending time in the downtown Los Angeles public library — old smells, multiple floors, the kind of place that holds everyone and belongs to no one. He read whatever called to him, and kept returning to the same questions: how people work, why they hurt, what makes change possible.

That pull still shapes how he listens.

His clinical background runs through public health, leadership & belonging, and child development — fields that share a single underlying question: how do early structures shape what a person becomes capable of later, and what are the concerns people/cultures/society have about change? Loyalty to family, ethnic groups, culture, nationality, friends, etc., often keeps people stuck, and so we work around how to have choice in that loyalty. We are not releasing people or connections, but releasing the messages you didn’t choose.

Internal Family Systems is his primary framework — a way of understanding the psyche as a plurality rather than a command structure. Parts with competing histories, competing fears, competing bids for control. The work isn't to resolve that plurality, but to understand what each part is protecting, and what would allow it to relax. He also draws on EMDR, somatic work, brainspotting, sex therapy, and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy — additional languages for what talk alone sometimes can't reach.

He loves learning from people, reading about behaviors, and various modalities. He doesn't confuse reading with knowing someone.

He keeps his caseload small by design. The work requires it. The waitlist is a consequence of that choice, not a scheduling problem.

He works with individuals and relationships — couples, friends, family. His practice has developed particular depth around ethically non-monogamous people, people of the global majority, LGBTQ communities, and around men and masculine people navigating sex, romance, and the specific difficulty of saying true things in rooms where it actually counts.

The thread across all of it: reflective people who grew up wondering about their place. Who sensed early that something important was happening around them — and spent years finding language for it. Who are now ready, or almost ready, to see what that early education actually cost them. And what it made possible.

Julian is queer, trans, Latino, a parent, and neurodivergent. He works this material in his own life, not only in his practice.

He founded Cabezas Therapy, where a team of licensed clinicians and supervised graduate therapists to shift relationships and create ripples in our society.