Monica Kelly, LCSW-S

Trauma Therapist in Round Rock, Texas

Your sense of self feels like an internal battle between who you are and who others expect you to be. You feel overwhelmed by the desire to change, but struggle to get deeper to the root of your pain.

You’ve come to the right place.

Sharing our stories is essential to our survival. It’s time for your story to be heard.


I’m Monica.

(she/her)

I help courageous humans just like you: ones who have it within to live as their true selves, but just need the support to get there.

I help my clients find clarity, peace, and joy by equipping them with the tools they need to understand themselves and how their stories brought them to this moment in time. 

Many of today’s solutions for people with historically oppressed identities are one-size-fits-all and derived from white supremacy, leading so many to feel misunderstood and even harmed. I know that your circumstances are unique, so every step we take is culturally responsive and tailored to your life story

First, we explore the underlying factors causing you to feel overwhelmed, burnt out, and exhausted. Then, we look at your story and the systems that have impacted it to determine the tools that will be most effective for you. Through our work together, you’ll be equipped to reconnect with your inner strength, joy, and playfulness, to feel content and grounded. I want you to trust your innate wisdom and create connectedness and wholeheartedness. Above all, know that you have a partner, cheerleader, and fighter in me.

I am dedicated to helping people come home to themselves.


I am formally trained as a trauma-informed social worker, first and foremost, and then a therapist. My approach to therapy is grounded in empathy and validation, liberation, and anti-oppression, with a deep understanding of the external systems that impact our lives. But at the end of the day, you want to know you’re working with someone who gets what it means to be a person with many marginalized identities struggling with feeling “wrong”, right?

More important than my formal training is that I am a fellow human, along on this weird, often fucked up, sometimes beautiful journey. I bring my full self to our sessions and I am not a “blank slate”. I get what it feels like to long for a white-sounding first and last name, to resent your appearance, to feel guilty about forging a path that’s different from what your family wants for you.

I try to be the type of therapist that I would want to work with.

Experience & Education

Degrees

  • Master of Social Work, Arizona State University 2010

  • Bachelor of Social Work, Arizona State University, 2009

Licensure

Certifications/Focused Trainings

  • Trauma-Conscious Yoga Method Certification, June 2023

  • Navigating Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation, July 2022

  • The Art of Clinical Supervision, January 2022

  • Racial Justice Reading Group, February-May 2021

  • Anti-Diet Work as Death Work, November 2020

  • Foundations in Chicanx Psychology, October-November 2020

  • EMDR Basic training, July-September 2020

TL; DR

MY IDENTITIES

  • indigenous Latina

  • daughter of an immigrant

  • cisgender woman

  • queer

  • fat

  • child-free by choice

I HELP PEOPLE WITH:

  • trauma

  • family of origin challenges

  • difficult parents/childhood emotional neglect

  • navigating working in a helping profession

  • cultural/identity oppression

  • body neutrality/fat acceptance

  • anxiety &/or depression

MY APPROACHES TO THERAPY

  • liberation & anti-oppression focused

  • culturally responsive

  • attachment-oriented

  • relationally-focused

  • LGBTQ+ affirming

  • sex positive, sex worker friendly

  • intersectional feminist

About the Practice

Ascend Counseling and Wellness is a life-affirming therapy practice in Round Rock, Texas, founded on the idea that building from past experiences enables healing and growth. Inspired by the mythology of the Phoenix, we believe that through the process of therapy, one is able to emerge from ashes—perhaps the discomfort of depression or anxiety, distress from past trauma, or changing relationships with yourself, your body, or others—and ascend, transformed and renewed. Therapy asks that we examine what needs to change, and release ourselves from our old stories, habits, and ways of living in order to reawaken with a renewed self.

“In order to rise from its own ashes, a phoenix first must burn.”

-Octavia Butler