Cristina Maria Fort Garcés, LCAT, ATR-BC, CPC

Psychotherapist & Coach

Somatic Therapist & Nervous System Healing

Shadow work for the pain, and the needs you learned to hide to stay loved.

Meet the parts you hid, and take their power back.

WHAT SHADOW WORK IS

The shadow is what we learn to keep in the basement.

As a kid, you figured out fast which parts of you got a warm response and which got a cold stare, a sigh, or a "that's too much." The anger, the neediness, the ambition, the loud laugh, and the wanting all went down to the basement so you could stay close to the people you needed. That basement is your shadow.

Those parts did not go quiet. They run things from below. You feel them when a coworker irritates you far beyond what she did, when a friend's good news lands like a small punch in the stomach, when you say yes with a smile and feel a hum of resentment, or when you are tired from holding a door shut.

Shadow work is how you open that door safely. You meet what has been down there, understand what it has been guarding, and bring that energy back into your life.

THE DESCENT

Every culture has a story about going down.

Long before anyone had a word for the unconscious, people told stories about it. Almost every tradition has one: a goddess or hero goes underground, loses something, meets something frightening, and returns changed.

In one of the oldest, the Sumerian goddess Inanna leaves her throne and descends through seven gates into the underworld. At each gate she gives up a piece of her regalia, her crown, her jewels, her robe, until she arrives with nothing. Waiting for her is her dark sister, her own shadow, and the meeting changes everything. In the Greek story, Persephone is pulled below, eats the pomegranate seeds, and becomes queen of the place that swallowed her.

These stories are maps. They say the way to your power runs through the part of you that you buried, and that what you surrender at each gate, an old role, a mask, a story about who you have to be, is what makes the return possible.

If you are reading this, you may be standing at a gate. A strategy that used to work has stopped working, an old envy has gotten loud, or something under the surface keeps pulling at you. That pull is information, and you do not have to follow it alone.

How I work

We go down slowly, with the body as our guide.

Your body knows where your shadow lives: the clench in your jaw when she laughs, the heat behind your sternum, the heaviness that shows up before you know why. We start there, with what you feel right now.

From there, we turn the lights on in the dark room slowly, 1% at a time. You never have to relive anything or fall apart to do this work. You set the pace, and we meet the parts of you that live in the dark one at a time, until you understand what each of them has been protecting you from.

My training in creative arts therapy and body-centered psychotherapy means we can use more than words: drawing, imagery, movement, and symbol, whatever lets the hidden part speak. As that happens, heavy, stuck energy starts to move, and clients tend to describe more breath, more appetite, and a gentler inner critic.

Six doorways into the shadow.

We move through these at the pace your nervous system sets.

THE METHOD

How we meet what you've hidden.

Four steps, taken slowly.

Ground. We steady your body first, so you can look at the dark without being swallowed by it.

Track. We follow sensation, image, and feeling to the place where the hidden part lives.

Meet. You hear what that part has been carrying, and it learns it is wanted.

Integrate. What you reclaim moves into your relationships, your work, and your daily rhythm, with ritual to mark the crossing.

Bring what you can't name yet. We will find the words on the way down.

My Background

Clinically Trained. Mystically Tuned. Deeply Human.

Cristina Maria Fort Garcés, LCAT, ATR-BC, CPC

I'm a Latinx certified developmental somatic psychotherapist and licensed creative arts therapist with nearly two decades of experience across clinical, creative, and intuitive healing spaces. I've worked on inpatient units and studied ritual work, and I refuse to pretend those are different jobs.

As a first-generation Latinx person, I know what it is to carry more than one world in one body, and how much of ourselves we learn to hide in order to belong.

Most therapists won't pull a tarot card, and most spiritual coaches won't track attachment wounds. I hold both with care. In my space, your grief, magic, sensitivity, and shadow all have room.

I approach shadow work as a relationship, built on curiosity, consent, and compassion.

Cristina Maria Fort Garcés, LCAT, ATR-BC, CPC

Training, Certifications, Education, & Experience

You've circled this door long enough.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Shadow work questions, answered.

Services:

TWO PORTALS, ONE PATH TO WHOLENESS

Powerful pathways grounded in ritual, transformative tools, and methodologies designed to meet you in your evolution.

Two ways to work with me:

If both resonate, book a free 30-minute consultation and we will find your starting point together.

Once you book, you will get an email confirming our meeting. In our meeting we will explore your best path forward.

Let’s get honest, embodied, and a little bit magical.



The portal’s open. Step in when you’re ready.

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Rewriting Your Inner Story: A Somatic + Art Journal

Creative and body-based prompts to loosen the grip of the inner critic and find the voice underneath it, the one that actually knows what's true.