Caro Maltz (they/them) is a Clinical Trainee at MPG and a graduate student in the Mental Health Counseling program at SUNY New Paltz. Their approach to counseling is grounded in relational-cultural theory. In practice, this means Caro is drawn to how dis/connection shapes our experiences. From this perspective, they believe connection, therefore healing, can be achieved in a counseling relationship that prioritizes empathy, curiosity, and co-creation.

Before pursuing clinical training, Caro worked as a researcher at Yale University Department of Psychiatry, specializing in substance use disorder treatment with stigmatized and underserved populations. They have also worked with people navigating periods of significant transition, including early recovery and identity exploration. In addition, Caro has experience working with and supporting people diagnosed with serious and persistent mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, and C-PTSD. Caro works as a graduate research assistant at the Institute for Disaster Mental Health, where their focus is exploring the mental health needs of first responders and frontline workers.

Caro’s clinical interests include relationships and cycles of connection, identity exploration, grief and trauma, and developing greater attunement to emotional and somatic experience. They draw from DBT and ACT while primarily attending to relational and social contexts in which people cope and heal. Caro is also interested in advocacy and education around reducing pathologizing bias in counseling with people who practice consensual non-monogamy (CNM). They are open to working with people from late adolescence through middle adulthood.

Across their personal and professional lives, Caro is drawn to questions of power, identity, and how to hold seemingly conflicting experiences simultaneously. They’re interested in exploring both/and: both autonomy and connection, both acceptance and change.

Tommy Walker is a graduate student in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Antioch University, currently completing his practicum at Maverick Psychotherapy Group. He brings a relational and liberation-focused approach to his clinical work, shaped by a mix of relational, contemplative, and trauma-informed work and a deep interest in how people make meaning out of difficult experience. Before this, he spent fifteen years in senior nonprofit leadership, drawn always to the human work underneath the organizational work.

He grew up in the Deep South, queer and trans, in a place where identity was complicated and sometimes dangerous. It's left him with an understanding, and deep respect for how difficult it can be to find safe spaces. 

His clinical training includes a year-long Foundations in Contemplative Care program through the NY Zen Center for Contemplative Care, a year-long psychoanalytic and decolonial reading group exploring the inner world in the context of oppression and lived experience, and additional trainings in Emotion-Focused Therapy, shame and self-criticism, and Narrative Exposure Therapy. He is also actively studying Mentalization-Based Treatment. 

His clinical interests include LGBTQ+ mental health (particularly trans and nonbinary experiences), complex and developmental trauma, relational patterns and interpersonal difficulties, moral injury and religious trauma, grief and loss, and identity development across the lifespan.