You Might Also Like: The Psychology of your 20s

**Jemma Spake** (0:04)
Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Spake, and welcome back to The Psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our 20s, and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here, back for another episode as we of course, break down the psychology of your 20s. Today, I have a very special episode for you all, basically an hour of free therapy. A huge focus of this podcast is mental health and its psychology.
Psychology is in the name and we talk about so many concepts and theories, even therapeutic practices and interventions. We talk about it all the time. But what I have never done is just sat down and done a full episode on what therapy actually is, what it aims to do, what it means to be a therapist, what it means to be in therapy. Everybody tells us that it's helpful. Everybody tells us it's this magical thing. Why? Why just talking to a stranger help?
What can you expect? Why does it change people? So in this episode, we're going to break down exactly what therapy does, the real psychology behind why change happens, and what it means to be a therapist, what it means to go to therapy. We're also bringing on a very special guest, Dr. Sandra Espinoza. She is the Associate Professor and the former Branch Director for the Couple and Family Therapy Program at Alliant University. She's going to share some amazing expertise with us today. Dr. Espinoza, welcome to the show.

**Dr. Sandra Espinoza** (1:44)
Thank you so much for having me, Jemma. I'm excited to be here.

**Jemma Spake** (1:47)
Yeah, I'm so excited to have you here. Do you want to introduce yourself and just like talk about the work that you do at Alliant and also beyond because you do some cool stuff? Sure.

**Dr. Sandra Espinoza** (1:56)
Yeah, so I am an associate professor at Alliant University. I have been at Alliant now for, I think, 10 years and I have been a therapist for about 13, I think, going on 14
So I'm a clinician and an educator. I have a really small private practice where I see clients and I see mostly couples as well as a lot of women and a lot of clients that identify as immigrants. So I have my clinical work, I have my teaching, I do some research and then I think the part that brings the most meaning to my work is that I'm also an organizer for a volunteer group of therapists who donate their time to serving immigrants, specifically undocumented immigrants, and I've been organizing for that for the past year. So there are folks who are just, again, donating their time to provide therapy for people who might not have access to it otherwise, and that has just been a really exciting and meaningful part of my career the past year. I'm also a mom, I am a mom of three, I have three little kids, I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a six-month-old, so I know. So I have my hands full with that, and I am Mexican American, I am a proud daughter of immigrants and so I'm bilingual, and I speak Spanish, and so just really passionate about doing clinical work with the Latinx community.

**Jemma Spake** (3:27)
That is so impressive, but also a double thanks for being here today because you have a lot of other stuff that probably is a little bit more important. But I honestly feel like that was why I really wanted to speak to you, because you've just done so much over so many different, so many different parts of the psychology discipline and the therapy discipline, like what you can do and how you can help at every single level. A lot of our listeners are doing psychology, want to become therapists or just in general, trying to figure out who they want to become.
You specifically, what did your journey into this field actually look like? Did you come into it? Did you always know this is what you wanted to be doing?

**Dr. Sandra Espinoza** (4:09)
Yeah, sure. When I was in my undergrad, I was really interested in working with kids and working more in the education field, and so I worked in a lot of after-school programs. I worked for the Boys and Girls Club, I did AmeriCorps, and that work was really meaningful, and I still carry so many of the amazing memories that I made in working with children. But what I noticed is that when I was working with the kids, a lot of them came from some challenging backgrounds, and even though they had these amazing programs that they were attending with me after school, I didn't feel like it was enough to really make an impact in their lives.