Sofia Gomez Botero
MA, AMFT
Associate Staff Therapist
Sofia is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist who uses a warm, non-judgmental approach to help clients achieve their goals. Sofia views therapy as a dynamic, collaborative process of healing and self-exploration, and she brings compassion and curiosity into the therapy room to create a safe environment where clients can engage in that deep process. Sofia offers culturally attuned and LGBTQIA+ affirming therapy to adolescents, adults, couples, and families seeking help with personality disorders, relational or complex trauma, mood and anxiety disorders, and eating disorders. As a bilingual therapist, Sofia is happy to work with clients in English, Spanish, or both.
Sofia has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, where she majored in Cognitive Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology and minored in Health Policy. After spending three years on the East Coast working with healthcare companies as a consultant for Deloitte Consulting, Sofia realized her true passion was in working with clients, and she then completed her master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy at the University of Southern California. Sofia began her training in a community mental health setting at Pelican Cove Counseling Center, where she provided long-term psychodynamic therapy to adolescents, adults, and couples for over a year before graduating from USC and joining Suzanne Wallach & Associates and SoCal DBT.
Sofia completed her foundational training in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy at Marsha Linehan’s Behavioral Tech. She is completing her DBT mentorship and prelicensure hours under the supervision of Dr. Suzanne Wallach at SoCal DBT, where she is also receiving comprehensive training as a DBT skills group leader, primary therapist, and team member within the SoCal DBT program. In SoCal DBT’s comprehensive DBT program, Sofia sees teens aged 13 and up, adults across the lifespan, couples, and families, and provides parents with parent skills training. In 2024 Sofia was trained in Prolonged Exposure by Melanie S. Harned, who developed this modality of trauma treatment to specifically treat PTSD among high-risk and multi-problem clients who are receiving DBT. The DBT PE protocol is based on Prolonged Exposure therapy and was adapted to fit the needs of this complex client population. DBT with the DBT PE protocol is a comprehensive treatment designed to help these tremendously suffering individuals recover from trauma and build lives they experience as worth living. Being trained in PE for DBT enables Sofia to treat complex trauma cases that many other DBT therapists cannot treat past Stage 1 of DBT.
In private practice at Suzanne Wallach & Associates, Sofia takes a trauma-informed approach to working with clients aged 6 and up, incorporating psychodynamic, family systems, play therapy, and DBT modalities. With all her clients, Sofia strives to build relationships characterized by warmth, honesty, compassion, and the highest quality of clinical care.
