Love isn’t a feeling. Love is a set of behaviors. And those behaviors get complicated.
Marriage and family therapist trainee, researcher, and writer in Los Angeles. Writing about how people carry love under duty and care, and how we use technology to hold onto it or control it.
I work at Cancer Support Community LA, as a trainee MFT.
Sitting with people living with cancer, and especially their loved ones, through caregiving, duty, and anticipatory grief. And with the bereaved, as they learn what love becomes after loss. Supervised by Jennifer Cumiskey, LCSW #94497.
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Writing about love, duty, and the tools we use to carry them.
A weekly essay series on how people use technology to express love, and to control it. Care and its cost. Duty mistaken for devotion. Where the resentment goes when it cannot go home.
Read the essays
How people look for care and reciprocity online, and what they build when they can’t find it.
Relationships heavy with obligation and short on give-and-take: the caregiver group chat, the co-parenting app, the forum for stepmothers. Fieldwork on the workarounds people build when a family runs on software.
Write about the work
Working psychodynamically, with IFS and IFIO for the loops.
Anticipated opening once registration with the Board of Behavioral Sciences comes through. A small caseload of individuals and couples, most likely by video across California. The list is how you find out.
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A biobehavioral read on caregiver distress. NCFR, November 2026.
Caregiving Oxytocin Reciprocity Disruption. An early framework for how unpaid care extracts from the people who give it, and what it would mean to design for that toll instead.
Ask about the framework
Maria & the work.
I’m a marriage and family therapist trainee in Los Angeles, working at Cancer Support Community Los Angeles under licensed supervision. I write, I research, and I sit with clients, and all three come back to the same question.
How do people navigate love, duty, and obligation?
Before this I spent ten years building products and teams at Microsoft, Shopify, and CHANI, where I was founding director of product. That work taught me to analyze structure. How a system is arranged, what it optimizes for, where the load falls.
It is also why I research and write about the way people use technology to ask for emotional support, to express despair, and to try to get control of something.
Illness arrives. A court order defines how you parent. Someone dies. These are the moments when the coping skills that used to work stop working, and when the way you relate to the people around you starts to strain. You might start doomscrolling or spiraling online. Relational therapy is useful here.
I’m training in IFS, IFIO, and EMDR alongside my master’s in clinical psychology and my clinical training at the Cancer Support Community.
Supervised by Jennifer Cumiskey, LCSW #94497.