About Carey
Carey Alvord is a licensed marriage and family therapist in California with more than two decades of experience. She focuses on attachment, developmental trauma, and parent-child relationships.
Background and approach
Carey aims to make therapy feel structured and calm so people can talk honestly about difficult feelings. Carey works with biological, foster, adoptive, and relative parents who want attachment-based parenting support.
She also sees teens and adults who want to better understand how childhood loss and early trauma shape their relationships and reactions. Sessions emphasize emotional safety and clear boundaries so clients feel respected while they work through painful topics.
Her approach draws on attachment-based methods and mindfulness to help people notice patterns and try different ways of relating. Carey also uses elements of narrative work and motivational interviewing to clarify goals and build steps toward them.
She blends these methods to fit the needs of each person rather than using a single formula. Carey has worked in mental health for 23 years and brings that long-term experience to each case.
She helps parents and individuals untangle repeating cycles and shift behavior in small, practical ways. Therapy often includes talking about early relationships, trying new interaction patterns, and practicing calm responses.
People who choose Carey can expect a steady, thoughtful clinician who values collaboration. She invites questions and works with clients to set clear goals.
The focus is on making relationships more manageable and on building skills that support everyday life.
How Carey’s Approaches Translate to Online Care
Attachment-based work focuses on how early relationships shape current reactions and closeness. Online sessions use conversation and guided exercises to notice attachment patterns and try different ways of connecting with others. Mindfulness therapy helps people build simple attention and breath practices to reduce reactivity and stay present during hard moments, which can be practiced during a call or via messaging prompts. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) offers concrete skills for emotion regulation and distress tolerance; online work often pairs short skill teaching with real-time coaching and follow-up text check-ins.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk with each person about their goals, try methods that fit those goals, and adjust as needed. Clients set priorities and Carey helps pick techniques that match what they want to change and how they prefer to work.
Online therapy with video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging offers flexibility for different schedules and needs. Video calls allow face-to-face interaction for deeper conversational work, phone sessions can be useful when bandwidth is limited or for a quick check-in, live chat suits shorter exchanges, and text messaging supports ongoing reminders and practice between sessions. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent while fitting it into daily life.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Attachment issues
- Blended family issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Compassion fatigue
- Dissociation
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Immigration issues
- Life purpose
- Multicultural concerns
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 23 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English