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I’m Jess (she/her), a Marriage and Family Therapist, supervisor, and the owner of Beyond Boundaries Counseling RGV.

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I’ve worked in mental health since 2016 and opened my first private practice in McAllen, Texas, in 2018. Before settling into private practice, my work took me through a pretty wide range of settings throughout the Rio Grande Valley. I’ve worked with underserved communities, teens experiencing substance use concerns, probation and court-ordered cases, groups, community-based services, high-needs case management, and jail-diversion programs.

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Those experiences taught me something I still carry into my work every day: people make a lot more sense when you understand the context of their lives.

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Today, I have the privilege of working with people here in the Rio Grande Valley and across Texas. I especially love creating therapy spaces for people who have not always felt understood, welcomed, or represented in traditional mental health settings.

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As a queer woman, LGBTQ+ affirming care is deeply important to me. My practice is also gender-affirming, neurodiversity-affirming, sex-positive, kink-aware, body-positive, and welcoming of traditional and nontraditional relationships and families.

 

I want therapy to be a place where you can bring your actual life into the room.

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Your identity. Your relationships. Your culture. Your body. Your sexuality. Your family. Your weird brain. Your complicated history. Your questions. The things you’re proud of and the things you still don’t quite know what to do with.

You do not need to become a more socially acceptable version of yourself before you are worthy of being understood.

One of the things I care about most is continuing the work that so many therapists, advocates, educators, and community members began before me: making mental health care more human, collaborative, culturally responsive, and accessible. I believe therapy should feel less like being examined by an expert and more like having a thoughtful conversation with someone who has expertise and respects that you are the expert on your own life.

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My clinical interests have continued to grow alongside the people I work with. I regularly study trauma and PTSD, anxiety, neurodivergence, relationships and attachment, gender and sexuality, cultural identity, generational trauma, immigration-related experiences, and the ways larger systems affect individuals and families.

 

Before I Became a Therapist...

My path here was not exactly a straight line.

And I’m very glad it wasn’t.

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Before becoming a therapist, I collected a somewhat eclectic assortment of jobs, studies, and life experiences.

I worked as a research assistant studying sand crabs on South Padre Island as part of an ecological research project through UT-Pan American. I studied primate play behavior at the Gladys Porter Zoo. I studied butterflies and native plants at the National Butterfly Center and later worked there providing wildlife education to children, helping with events, managing the gift shop, and learning more about the incredible ecosystem we have here in South Texas.

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I also spent years working with children and families. I taught music, movement, baby and toddler classes, gymnastics, and even Mommy-and-Baby yoga. I worked in early childhood education and eventually became a private nanny and family assistant.

In my early twenties, I turned that work into my first business, training other women to work professionally as nannies.

Long before I knew what family systems theory was, I was getting a very intimate education in families.

I saw how different households communicate, how parents divide responsibilities, how children respond to stress, how relationships change under pressure, and how incredibly different one family can be from the next.

Looking back, there is a strange little thread connecting almost everything I have ever loved doing: people, behavior, relationships, curiosity, learning, and figuring out how complicated systems work.

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Apparently I just eventually traded butterflies and primates for humans.

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When I discovered the Marriage and Family Therapy program at Capella University, something clicked.

Marriage and Family Therapy looks at people within the systems around them rather than treating every struggle as something occurring inside one isolated individual. We pay attention to relationships, families, communities, culture, history, identity, environment, and the experiences that shaped the way someone learned to survive and connect.

That way of understanding people made sense to me.

It still does.

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Beyond Boundaries Counseling RGV is one of the things I am most proud to have built. After years of trying very different things, learning from very different people, and taking a somewhat scenic route through adulthood, I have never been more certain about the work I want to do.

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I genuinely love being a Marriage and Family Therapist.

I love the conversations. I love the complexity. I love watching people understand themselves differently. I love helping couples find the thing underneath the thing they keep fighting about. I love the moment someone realizes that a part of themselves they have spent years criticizing actually makes sense.

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And I love that after all these years, this work still makes me curious.

I hope it always does.

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