Robin Bates-Pualuan, MS, LMFT, LPCC – Marriage and Family Therapist

I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (license #MFC52419) and Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (license #LPC420), offering psychotherapy and counseling services in the south Bay Area. I focus on treating individual adults and parents of young children. As an intern, I worked with individuals, teens, children, couples, and families. I served as a school counselor at Leland High School, Castillero Middle School, Union Middle School, Guadalupe Elementary School and Los Alamitos Elementary School. I’ve taught parenting classes for parents of children of all age groups. I’ve also provided supportive telephone crisis counseling at Santa Clara County’s Suicide and Crisis Hotline and at Contact Cares Crisis Hotline.

I was born and raised in the south Bay Area. I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from UC Davis and a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from San Jose State University. After working in non-profit fundraising for nearly 10 years, my fascination with people’s life stories led me to choose a career helping others find new ways to tap into and fulfill their potential.

I am married and have two children. As a child of divorce, and now a married person myself, I have a special interest in relationships and the hard work it sometimes takes to keep our relationships healthy and strong. As a mother, I also particularly enjoy helping moms and dads work through the struggles that accompany the joys of raising kids.

Treatment Approach

I use a variety of approaches to address my clients’ unique needs. I work with individual adults utilizing cognitive behavioral (CBT) and existential therapy techniques to help you discover your genuine values, examine where you may be stuck in your life, and take action to move in the direction of what you truly desire. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Together we can look at these questions and generate new possibilities for you to try, moving you in the direction of your most fulfilling, authentic life.

Sometimes the challenges we face today are tangled up with challenges or experiences we had earlier in our lives. I am trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), an empirically validated therapeutic treatment for trauma and negative life experiences. Through desensitizing and reprocessing those life experiences I can help you work toward getting unstuck from the hold they have over you, and integrate all your life experiences into who you are today in a healthy, beneficial way.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education & Credentials:

  • B.A. in Psychology, UC Davis
  • M.S. in Clinical Psychology, San Jose State University
  • Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (license #MFC52419)
  • Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (license #LPC420)

Professional Associations:

  • California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT)
  • Santa Clara Valley chapter of CAMFT (SCV-CAMFT)
  • EMDR International Assocation (EMDRIA)