John Armando LCSW
Founder & Director
John Armando, LCSW
"I’m not interested in being the expert who has it all figured out. I’m interested in meeting you as a whole person - bringing what I know professionally and personally, and helping you find your own way forward."
How I Got Here
I didn’t take the conventional path to this work. In my twenties I had many formative experiences. My undergraduate degree was in Creative Writing. I worked at the renowned University of Arizona Poetry Center and received a small scholarship for poetry. I briefly wrote a column on dance in the Tucson Weekly. The work that helped to shape me most was Outdoor Education – I spent some time as a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) instructor, and in Non-profit management specifically in the performing arts in San Francisco. These experiences have influenced how I see things and how I understand people, and ultimately led me to attend Bryn Mawr college for my masters degree and I haven’t stopped learning since.
Over the past thirty years, I’ve worked in addiction treatment, chronic illness programs, a family medicine residency, behavioral health startups, and private practice. I’ve trained in CBT, Motivational Interviewing, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Internal Family Systems. I’ve taught graduate students and supervised therapists. But as much as I value the theory and evidence base, what I’ve learned from my own life matters just as much. From recovery. From loss. From raising a family. From getting lost sometimes and finding my way. From the kind of experiences that teach you what really matters.
How I Think About This Work
At our core, we all want safe connection – with others and with ourselves. But our relationship with our own inner experience often feels like a fight. Self-doubt, inner turmoil, that constant mental noise that won’t turn off. I help people find a different way to be with all of that – not by eliminating it, but by changing how they relate to it. We all get stuck in painful patterns. Real change doesn’t come from battling those patterns into submission. It comes from understanding them, making peace with the parts of ourselves we’ve been at war with, and discovering we already have what we need to move forward.
You are not broken. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with you. You already possess the resources to thrive – sometimes you just need someone to sit with you while you remember that and figure out how to access it.
I’m trained to work with depression, anxiety, substance use, trauma, and chronic health conditions. But honestly? Diagnoses rarely capture what people are actually struggling with. The real struggles are loneliness, feeling like an imposter, relationship conflict, overwhelming responsibility, fear of aging, not knowing who you are anymore now that your kids are grown or your career isn’t what you thought it would be.
These struggles don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re happening in the context of your relationships, your work, your losses, your life stage. My job isn’t to reduce you to a diagnosis. It’s to understand your actual experience and help you find your way through it. I take a hopeful, compassionate stance toward change because I’ve seen it happen – in my own life and in thirty years of sitting with people who thought they were stuck. Meaningful change is possible. And you don’t have to do it alone.