About Cristina

Cristina Benitez Allen (she/her), MA, LMFT #122778, is a queer femme identified ciswoman, mother, writer, and psychotherapist born and raised in traditional Tongva territory, Los Angeles. She currently resides in homelands of the Nisenan people known as Sacramento, CA. She originates from the villages of el cañon de Juchipila, Zacatecas, Mexico, with predominately Indigenous Meso American / Anahuac and Iberian bloodlines, including ancestral threads to the Mediterranean, North Africa and West Asia. Cristina is fluent in both English and Spanish and is sensitive to issues regarding identity, sexuality, gender, culture, and decolonizing. At Loyola Marymount University, she received her Bachelors in English and Spanish Literature, with a focus on creative writing and studied abroad in Mexico and Spain. She married shortly after graduating to her English sweetheart, whom she met on her travels.

Building her career in marketing and public relations in the music, fashion, and beauty industries, her trajectory took a turn when impairing injuries led to years of chronic pain. Coping with physical disabilities pushed her on a quest for greater meaning and healing. Her experience of Jungian analysis led her to formalize her interest in Depth Psychology following a trail of synchronistic events by studying at Pacifica Graduate Institute in autumn of 2010. There she focused on the value of mythology, symbol, archetype, ritual, storytelling, and community in the healing process as she unpacked systemic, intergenerational, and personal trauma. Through the continued practice and support of meditation, depth psychotherapy, yoga, dreamwork, expressive arts and creativity, somatic work, nutrition, fitness, a combination of western and eastern medicine, Cristina revitalized her body and stepped into her soul's calling. Her thirteen year struggle with fertility from debilitating reproductive disease, stage 4 endometriosis and adenomyosis, deepened her self trust and dedication to further healing initiations that made her a mother, to herself and to her child.

She obtained her Masters in Counseling Psychology in 2015. Her scholarly focus was a comprehensive study on the figure of the trickster child as an archetype from a religious, mythological, and depth perspective. Utilizing a heuristic methodology, she explored how the trickster child, as culture breaker/maker, carries the unconscious shadow of parental figures and becomes subversive to expose truths on intergenerational themes, while strategically developing creative possibilities for self-preservation, differentiation, and individuation.

As a psychotherapist, she is passionate about the embodiment of mindfulness and soulfulness with gentleness, humor, courage, imagination, and play. As a community center counselor, Cristina trained in Jungian and Sandplay methodologies and worked with individuals, groups, couples, families, and children. Giving great importance to the wisdom of the body, in 2013 she also began formally training in mindful body-centered psychotherapy with the Hakomi Institute of California, as well as, completing additional applications of the method in trauma. Cristina was instrumental in establishing Hakomi workshops, trainings, and building community in Los Angeles as lead assistant 2016 through 2019.

Her psychotherapy practice is rooted in the feminine principle, with a feminist approach in the spirit of ecofeminism and intersectionality. She is a ritualist holding animist values and ancestor reverence, especially guided by her abuelos y abuelas in the spirit realm. She practices meditation and holds a special interest in mysticism with reverence for world religions, earth-based spirituality, non-ordinary states of consciousness, Tarot, Goddess traditions, Yogic philosophy, Tibetan Buddhism and her culturally Catholic upbringing. From 2014 to 2021, Cristina founded a womxn’s healing circle with fellow therapists to synergistically lead rites of passage, support, and community. Guided by dreams, she began formally training as an initiate in 13 Moon Sacred Feminine Priestessing lineage in 2016 and she continues to study and reclaim/reindigenize ancestral Latine / Chicanx Meso American Anahuacan sacred rites, healing practices, and traditions. She is committed to social activism through the acts of ritual and relational repair. She grateful for her current femtor/mentor Raina Manuel Paris, PhD and is a student of Daniel Foor LMFT, Elayne Doughty LMFT and ceremonialist Rebecca Cavender. As a poet and writer, she draws on her cultural roots for inspiration and nourishment. She enjoys cooking, gardening, music, the arts, travel, time with family and friends, and the company of her cat and two dogs.

Cristina is dedicated to learning and unlearning in service of systemic change, anti-racism, and dismantling oppressive patriarchy, toxic capitalism, and white supremacy. She stands in support and solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, indigenous, migrant, and refugee communities, LGBTTQIA+, and discriminated people based on body, ability, creed, ethnicity, gender, legal status and class.