About Our Center
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Welcome to a Truly
Inclusive, Affirming Practice.
"I want to wish you a warm welcome as you begin your journey with us at the Aguirre Center for Inclusive Psychotherapy. It has been one of my professional dreams to create a center specializing in culturally-responsive and anti-oppressive treatment where everyone--clients, therapists, trainees, and our community at large -- could experience a true a sense of belonging and inclusion. Throughout this website I have provided extensive information about our inclusive and culturally-affirming services, and my hope is to destigmatize and demystify the therapy process through transparency. I encourage you to take a look at the pages on this website to see if our center might be the right fit your needs. Seeking help in one of the most courageous things you can do for yourself., and I am deeply honored you are considering working with us. "
Dr. Sophia Aguirre
Dr. Sophia Aguirre, Ph.D., CGP, FAGPA - Founder & Director at ACIP
Our Philosophy & Core Values
Sensitive to the unique needs of BIPOC, Latinx, & LGBTQ communities and relationship structure minorities (Poly/CNM/ENM communities)
Empowering our clients to understand and dismantle the systems of oppression in our society including, white supremacy
Promoting body liberation, Health at Every Size, and advocating against fat phobia, sizism and size oppression
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Acknowledgement of those that came before us historically and those who still stand with us on this sacred land
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Inclusive & Culturally Responsive
We are committed to providing excellent psychological services for our communities, with a special focus on those who hold marginalized identities, including Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and to gender, sexuality or relationship minorities. We strive to provide culturally responsive and affirming services that are sensitive to the unique needs and challenges faced by marginalized communities. Our practice is sex-positive, trauma-informed, weight-inclusive, Feminist-informed, and affirming of folks from LGBTQ+, Kink, and Polyamory/Consensual non-monogamy communities.
Our therapists have been heavily influenced by anti-oppression and Liberation psychology movements. We recognize all types of diversity that leads to oppression in our society, including ethnicity, race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, class, size, citizenship status, religion and ability. The historical systems of oppression (including white supremacy) that our society operates under impacts all of us regardless of the specific social identities we hold. In our clinical work, we seek to understand dynamics of power, privilege, and oppression that have shaped our clients identities, lived experiences and how they have impacted their mental health. For the BIPOC community, healing the wounds from racial stress and racial trauma (microaggressions, racism, violence, stereotypes, poverty, and discrimination) is often an important facet of therapy. As therapists, we seek ways to share power with our clients and assist clients in stepping into their own power, both in therapy and in their lives outside therapy. Our culturally-affirming approaches honor the cultural practices, traditions, and creativity that have enabled our BIPOC communities to build resilience and also recognize the impact of systemic oppression and racial injustice.
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While we can never fully understand every facet of cultural diversity that comprise our clients’ experience, our therapists practice from a framework of cultural humility where we seek to understand the sociocultural lenses from which our clients view their systems and experiences. Our commitment to providing culturally responsive services and developing cultural humility is an ever unfolding process where we strive to educate ourselves so that we can more effectively support our clients. As therapists, we continually question our assumptions and explore the limitations of our worldviews shaped by our own intersectional identities. Our therapists actively engage in ongoing personal and professional development opportunities to increase our awareness of our biases so that we may provide culturally-responsive and culturally-affirming services to the communities that we serve.
Anti-Oppressive & Anti-Racist
ACIP is Latinx-owned business founded on principles of an anti-oppression and anti-racism. We understand that simply identifying as "not a racist" is woefully insufficient and misses the mark. We boldly strive to be anti-discrimination, anti-oppression, and anti-racists. ACIP is firmly committed to deconstructing institutional racism, white supremacy, and other oppressive systems across levels of our practice: our policies, procedures, organizational culture, and clinical work. To this end, our therapists actively engage in ongoing education and courageous conversations to increase our awareness of our own experiences of power, privilege, and oppression. We believe as ethical mental health clinicians that we must continually consider and self-reflect on the following:
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Where do I hold privilege and how might these areas affect my work?
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How have these cultural influences shaped who I am, how I see myself, how I see my clients, and how my clients see me?
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How have they influenced my comfort level with other groups?
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What kind of assumptions might be made regarding my visible identities? How have I made assumptions about other visible identities?
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How can I go about seeking spaces to further develop my awareness of biases that may exist because of my privileged identities?
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We collectively strive through these ongoing practices, to create a courageous, educated, and comfortable space to explore identity and the impacts that culture, society, power, and oppression have on each one of us and on our clients. As individuals and as a team of therapists, we strive to embody and practice consistently our ascribed values of inclusion, anti-oppression, and cultural humility. We recognize that as part of our journey, we will at times miss the mark or inadvertently make mistakes that are inconsistent with our values and intentions. We strive to remain humble, open, and ready for feedback when we don’t get things right. This includes leaning into the discomfort that arises, listening, reflecting and making the necessary corrections needed for healing, growth, and repair.
Body Liberation &
Weight Inclusion
At ACIP, we affirm the values body liberation: we believe that ALL bodies are worthy and ALL bodies are deserving of compassionate, inclusive healthcare. We believe that YOU are an expert of your own body and that your body has the right exist just as it is. Unfortunately, many people with marginalized bodies frequently experience body policing in our society, particularly those that are fat, racialized, trans, queer, gender non-conforming or disabled. Our clinicians utilize a social justice lens that promotes fat acceptance and body liberation by examining the detrimental impact of sizism, sexism, transphobia, ableism and racism on both individual and societal levels. Body liberation can mean:
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Rejecting societies narrow ideals of beauty
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Taking back control over how your body “should” be
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Giving yourself permission to live unapologetically in your own body
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Releasing the belief that your worth is based on your weight
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Promoting the understanding that no one can know another person’s health or abilities just by looking at them
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Speaking out against body shaming, ableism, and and body-based discrimination
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We are committed to cultivating affirming, trauma-informed healing spaces that honors our clients' individual definition of health and wellness. Our clinical approaches are informed by Health at Every Size principles which include celebrating body diversity, promoting weight/size-inclusivity and advocating for critical awareness cultural messages, structural and systemic forces, and scientific assumptions that contribute to fat-shaming, and fat phobia. We are passionate about helping our clients develop healthier relationships with their body and with food.
Land Acknowledgement
It is of the upmost importance to acknowledge those who came before us, those who walk among us and those who will stand after us in the generations to come. Our office is based in Atlanta, Georgia which sit on the stolen territories of the Muscogee (Creek) people. The Muscogee people were expelled from their ancestral lands, which include the areas now known as Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. Before their forced removal by the US government, the Muscogee people lived in sophisticated, complex societies (complete with art, music, ceremony, agriculture, architecture and trade industries) and autonomous tribal towns that together formed a multi-part union known as the Muscogee Creek Confederacy. We believe it is important to honor the painful history of genocide and the thousands of lives lost during the Trail of Tears.
We gratefully acknowledge the Muscogee people on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as as well as the diverse and vibrant Native communities who still make their home here today (according to the 2010 Census, the state of Georgia reported that approximately 2% of the Atlanta population was Native American). We are grateful for the opportunity to work and live here, and to offer healing to clients and each other, on these indigenous peoples’ traditional homelands.
