Education, Research, Training

• Ph.D. Candidate, Clinical Sexology, Modern Sex Therapy Institutes

• AASECT Certified Sex Therapist

• M.A., Counseling Psychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute

• B.A., American Studies, Dickinson College

There is a throughline that traces from my undergraduate work into my doctoral research. It draws from my personal life and informs my stance as a therapist.

As an undergraduate, I focused on questions of race, gender, and sexuality and their intersections with systems of power, resistance, and self-expression. 

My master's research drew upon attachment theory, interpersonal neuroscience, and how we can regulate the nervous system with breath, communication, and movement.
 

My research, as well as a lifetime in sport and a decade as Head Coach of the University of California, Santa Barbara Triathlon Team, all informed the writing of my thesis, Attachment Based Coaching: Neuroscience and the Integration of Heart and Soul in Sport.

My doctoral research explores the intersections of self-expression, sex, gender, and sexuality within our most intimate relationships and in everyday life.

Upon completing the PhD, I will resume work on a book that expands on my earlier research and presents a range of practical strategies that coaches and athletes can use to cultivate resilience, mental toughness, connection, and meaning through a life in sport.

As a psychotherapist, researcher, and high-performance athletic coach, my work has centered on how attuned relational experiences can help to regulate internal states, increase attachment security, enhance athletic performance, and deepen connection and intimacy across one's life.

In psychotherapy, I approach clients with empathy, curiosity, and humility to support clients in strengthening their own inherent capacities for awareness, internal regulation, integration, and resilience.

In my personal life, I have benefitted from many forms of privilege.

Although white-presenting, I am a person of mixed racial and cultural descent with strong ties to my maternal Puerto Rican heritage and language. Although gender and sexuality expansive, due to heteronormative assumptions, I am often read as masculine and straight.

These are just two pillars of identity that confer significant unearned privilege upon me. 

The experience of having broad access and opportunity within the dominant culture, while in many regards also being an outsider, has afforded me a unique perspective both personally and clinically.

My clinical, therapeutic lens is relational, attachment-based, and liberatory. 

Liberatory in the sense that it rests upon the principle that we have the capacity, and sometimes the responsibility, to question, and occasionally to challenge, dominant cultural constructs that inform identity, self-expression, and power.

These structures of identity, self-expression, and power are present, often in unquestioned and compulsory forms, within our most intimate relationships. As a result, they can have unseen yet profound impacts on the ways that we experience ourselves, our relationships, our communities, and our lives.

Relational Psychotherapy deals with the experience and impact of relationships across one’s life. Within relationships we experience some of our deepest pain, and it is within relationships that recovery and repair are also possible.

Relational Psychotherapy is grounded on the premise that the therapeutic relationship is an arena in which one can feel safe, seen, heard, and understood. It is a venue in which one can encounter and experience listening, empathy, attunement, and care. 

Within a safe and trusting relationship, one can begin to explore, process, and integrate experiences and memories, and one can begin to create new pathways and possibilities for oneself, one's relationships, and one's life.

The therapeutic relationship can provide opportunities for sharing, processing experiences and emotions, and fostering trust. Therapeutic experiences that are affirming and supportive, while also challenging, can serve as a counterpoint to adverse experiences, strengthen one's sense of oneself, and provide a template for improving other relationships in one’s life.

Mateo Mercur Relational Psychotherapy, Boulder, CO – Private practice. Individual, couple, and multi-partner sex and relationship therapy.

The Mind Embodied, Broomfield, CO – Group practice. Individual, couple, and multi-partner sex and relationship therapy.

Naropa Community Counseling Center, Boulder, CO – Individual and couple therapy on The Mindful Medicaid Team.

Child Abuse Listening and Mediation (CALM), Santa Barbara, CA – Child and family therapy for families in crisis.

University of California, Santa Barbara Drug and Alcohol Center, Santa Barbara, CA – Individual and group therapy, providing psychoeducation and harm reduction strategies around substance use and abuse in the university setting.