Aloha mai kākou (greetings to us all), I’m Alexis.
I am a mixed race Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cis queer woman. I’m a mama, a wife, an autoimmune warrior and a person who stutters.
I also happen to be a holistic mental health therapist and functional health coach who sees you for the warrior you are.
A Little About Me
I know what it’s like to wake up wishing you were someone else. Being born with a stutter, I spent many years wishing I could talk like normal people and hating myself. I also struggled with the impact of having a white (Irish) mother and a brown BIPOC (Native Hawaiian and Chinese) father and the ways that my mixed race status was perceived by others and impacted how they treated me. I often tried to assimilate by playing up my white features with my white friends, playing up my brown and asian features with my BIPOC friends. Not to mention that benefiting from white privilege but descending from severely oppressed and colonized brown people (and experiencing racism myself) was a mind fuck that left me feeling confused and conflicted.
I never felt good enough and I wished I was more confident, pretty and fearless. Alcohol and drugs didn’t really help as they ended up making me feel worse. Trying to be perfect and pretend like everything was fine made me feel alone. When I decided to swing to the opposite end of the pendulum and act like I didn’t give a shit about anything, my life imploded (enter a short stay in a lovely Honolulu jail here).
While there are lots of ways to just manage the pain and help you cope, my goal is to help you learn how to both tolerate and heal your own emotional and psychological pain and develop the community needed to continue that healing so that the ground doesn’t come out from under you every time something hard happens.
Professional Bio
Helping people who feel disempowered and unsure of themselves reconnect to their “Mana” (Hawaiian for power or life force) is my life’s work.
- B.A in psychology from the University of Hawaii at Manoa
- M.A. in Transpersonal Counseling Psychology from Naropa University
- 8 years experience working in agencies providing individual and group therapy for people with complex trauma, mental health illnesses and addiction
- Providing therapy in private practice since 2014
- Extensive training in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
- Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Level 1 practitioner
- Completion of Maternal Mental Health Certificate Course from Post Partum Support International
- Certified Internal Family Systems Therapist, Level 3 trained
- Approved Internal Family Systems Therapy Clinical Consultant
- Mindfulness practitioner since 2008
- Certified Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner (Functional Health Coach) providing functional lab testing to identify root causative factors underlying mental, emotional and physical symptoms since 2022
Are you ready to stop feeling like the underdog and heal your own pain so you can ride the ups and downs of life with ease?
Contact Me
I help people who feel disempowered, oppressed and unsure of themselves connect to their "Mana" (Hawaiian for power or life force). It's time to turn towards the parts of you that you hate so that you can develop more self love and self acceptance in order to live life as the confident warrior you are.
Alexis Ornellas, LPC
LPC0012209
Address: 80 Garden Center, Suite 2 Broomfield, CO 80020
Phone: 646-651-2312
Email: alexis@manacounseling.com
DISCLAIMER: Stock images on this page are being used for illustrative purposes only; any person depicted in stock images are models.