About Leslie
Leslie Patricia Acoca is a California licensed marriage and family therapist with 20 years of clinical experience. She creates a calm, welcoming space where people can talk about stress, anxiety, grief, trauma, and relationship concerns. She focuses on practical steps that reduce day-to-day distress.
Sessions often include learning new coping skills, changing unhelpful thinking patterns, and improving how people connect with others. She works with intimacy-related issues, addictions, self-esteem struggles, career transitions, and the strain that comes with caregiving and compassion fatigue.
Background and approach
Leslie has deep experience supporting people facing loss, including those grieving deaths and people affected by suicide. She also helps clients manage multicultural concerns, navigate infidelity and jealousy, and address veteran and armed forces issues. Her approach adapts to what each person brings to the room.
Her work draws on attachment-based ideas and cognitive behavioral methods to rebuild trust and shift patterns that cause pain. She also uses client-centered listening and skills from dialectical behavior therapy to strengthen emotion regulation. For relationship problems she incorporates steps from the Gottman Method to improve communication.
Therapy with Leslie is practical and collaborative. She helps people set small goals, practice new ways of relating, and notice progress over time. If someone is coping with life changes, parenting stress, or long-term anxiety, she offers straightforward support and steady guidance.
How Leslie combines therapy approaches online
Attachment-Based Therapy helps people understand how early bonds shape current relationships and reactions. It can be useful for clients who want to change patterns of distance or clinging in close relationships and build more supported ways of connecting.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, focuses on spotting and changing thoughts and behaviors that fuel anxiety and low mood. It typically involves clear, doable exercises and homework to test new ways of thinking in daily life.
Finding the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will listen to your goals, try methods that fit your needs, and adjust the plan based on what helps. This collaborative process makes it easier to settle on techniques that feel useful and realistic.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to match different lifestyles. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues, phone sessions work when bandwidth is limited, live chat suits quick check-ins, and messaging supports ongoing processing between meetings. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy days and changing schedules.
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What this therapist works with
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Also listed
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- California
- Languages
- English
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