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Insights that will change you and your family. Therapy to heal, rediscover yourself, and foster healthy relationships.
 

About
Danielle Gonzales

 
 
 

Welcome. I’m Danielle Gonzales, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the founder of Insightful Therapy. I’ve been working as a therapist since 2018, supporting children, parents, families, and women through many seasons of life. Our early experiences, relationships, identities, and environments shape how we move through the world and are woven into the challenges and edges we encounter.

I am a woman of mixed heritage with Mesoamerican and Swedish roots. I am diasporic, meaning I was not raised on ancestral lands or with cultural ways of being — due to systemic oppression, cultural erasure, and the broader disconnection so many of us inherit. My ancestors are from Purépecha, Otomi, and Zapotec, which are indigenous civilizations in Mesoamerica, and from Central Gothland in Sweden. I grew up in the Central Valley in California until moving to Washington in 2016.

Over the years, I’ve worked with children, parents, families, and women navigating relational and developmental trauma, attachment wounds, neurodivergence, separation and divorce, identity and unmasking, family transitions, and the complexities of mixed-neurotype relationships and households.

A significant part of my work has been with children and families, supporting children in expressing and processing their inner worlds through play, imagination, creativity, and relationship. I help parents look beneath behavior to better understand what their child may be communicating, while strengthening connection, attachment, and trust within the parent-child relationship. With adults, much of my work centers on understanding the patterns and protective strategies shaped by earlier experiences, reconnecting with parts of themselves that have been pushed aside or misunderstood, and developing greater trust in themselves and their relationships.

 

My approach

I believe therapy is a process of coming into a deeper relationship with ourselves, which ripples into all of our relationships, including our kin. Many of us learn, often for very understandable reasons, to disconnect from our needs, emotions, bodies, or intuition. We develop ways of protecting ourselves that help us survive difficult experiences, relationships, family dynamics, cultural expectations, or simply the stress of moving through a world that doesn’t always make space for who we are.

Rather than viewing these patterns as something wrong with you, I approach therapy with curiosity about how they developed, what they have been protecting, and what they may still be trying to communicate. I utilize a social justice lens and consider how our challenges make sense within the families, relationships, systems, and cultures we live within.

My work is highly relational, experiential, and client-led. Together, we explore your past & current relationships, patterns, emotions, nervous system states, and the ways you experience yourself in your body. With children, this exploration happens through play, imagination, creativity, and relationship rather than relying solely on words.

I draw from Family Systems, Attachment Theory, Interpersonal Neurobiology, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Play Therapy, Deep Ecology, animist earth-based perspectives, and Sand Tray Therapy. These approaches help us understand not only what is happening, but how your experiences have shaped the ways you learned to relate to yourself and others.

At the center of my work is the belief that people are already whole. Therapy isn’t about turning you—or your child—into someone different. It is about creating enough safety, curiosity, and connection for the parts of you that have had to protect, adapt, mask, or disconnect to be understood, felt, & integrated.

The therapeutic relationship is an important part of that process. My clients and colleagues often describe me as having a calm presence, and I strive to create a space that feels collaborative, nonjudgmental, and genuinely human. I bring my clinical knowledge and experience into the room, while recognizing that you are the expert on your own lived experience.

We’ll work together as teammates—learning, noticing, experimenting, and making space for more of who you already are.

 
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Schooling, Experience,
and Certifications

  • Providing therapy to children, families, & women since 2018

  • Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist| State of Washington, License Number LF61567663

  • Work the Reconnects Facilitator Training | School for the Great Turning | 2026

  • Internal Family Systems Online Learning Circle | Internal Family Systems Institute | 2025

  • IFS and Polyvagal Theory: Healing Through Compassionate Connection | Introduction to IFS | The Knowledge Tree | 2025

  • Introduction to Synergetic Play Therapy & Consultation Group | 2024

  • Certificate in Play Therapy including training in Child-Centered Play Therapy, Sand Tray Therapy, and Child-Parent Relationship Therapy | Antioch University Seattle | 2019

  • Masters of Art in Marriage and Family Therapy | Antioch University Seattle | 2018

  • Certified Positive Discipline Parent Educator

  • Bachelor of Science in Psychology | University of Phoenix | 2015

 
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