Michael Montero, Licensed Master Social Worker

Growing up Puerto Rican and Queer in New York City, I learned early what it meant to occupy multiple worlds at once, and to feel like you fully belonged to none of them. I navigated the expectations of my culture and family while quietly holding a part of myself I did not yet have language for. I understood, long before I became a therapist, what it feels like to shrink yourself to fit a space that was not built with you in mind. That experience of living between cultures, between identities, between who I was and who I was expected to be is not something I left behind when I entered the therapy room. It is something I carry into it every single day, because I know it is something many of my clients are carrying too. My path into this work was not a straight line, and I think that matters. Before becoming a clinician, I spent years working in advocacy and health policy, including serving as Director of Health Policy and Advocacy at the Latino Commission on AIDS. That work brought me into direct contact with the ways systemic failures whether its racism, homophobia, poverty, and inadequate access to care show up not as abstract policy problems but as real suffering in real bodies. I saw how communities I loved and belonged to were being failed by systems that were supposed to protect them. That radicalized me in the best possible way. It taught me that healing is not a politically neutral act, and that you cannot separate a person's mental health from the conditions in which they are living. I carry that truth into everything I do clinically. I have also done my own work in therapy, in community, and in the ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable process of understanding myself. I know what it is like to sit with shame about parts of your identity that the world has told you are wrong, broken, or too much. I know what it is like to navigate grief, to question your own worth, to reach for connection, and pull back at the last moment because vulnerability felt too risky. Those experiences have not made me a perfect therapist. What they have made me is a more present one and someone who does not need you to explain why healing feels complicated, because I have lived some version of that complication myself. When I sit with a client who is learning to unmask, or grieving the family acceptance they deserved and never received, or trying to reconcile the person their culture expects them to be with the person they actually are, I am not approaching that from a clinical distance. I am approaching it with recognition. That is ultimately what I want every person who works with me to feel. That they do not have to translate themselves for me. That their full identity, their full history, and their full complexity are not only welcome in this space but are exactly what this space was built for.