Cecilia Ding, AMFT
Registered Associate MFT under supervision by Lena Axelsson, LMFT # 47915
Cecilia was born in China and grew up in America. She continues to learn and combine the lessons from both cultures. After graduating from Harvard University with a BA in East Asian Studies, she entered the financial industry, specializing in international IPO and venture capital. At 30, she started a real estate investment and management company. After finding money but not passion, she decided to change her focus and remain a passive investor. She spent several years writing and engaging in self-reflection that connected her love for the inner emotional world and led her to return to her roots of helping others as a life coach and therapist. After completing a Master’s in Counseling from Palo Alto University, she received training in mindfulness and somatic focusing, executive coaching, Internal Family Systems, Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, Sex Therapy, and trauma resolution techniques including EMDR and Brainspotting. She has also been trained in Hypnosis, CBT, DBT, play and movement therapy, continues to broaden her training every year and incorporates those methods as part of her integral approach.
She is especially passionate about combining the knowledge of the nervous system, the limbic system and neuroscience with therapeutic techniques that can empower clients to improve the quality of their lives. She believes awareness is the prerequisite for change, but is not sufficient. When we can incorporate deep understanding of how our body and our neural networks operate and embed those understandings into the way we breathe and feel, then we gradually build new habits that change the moment-to-moment experience of our daily lives, thus change the trajectory of our paths.
Having grown up and studied in multiple cultures, Cecilia is particularly experienced with the opportunities and challenges cross-cultural and intergenerational differences can bring for our growth and relationships. She is very experienced in guiding clients to transform themselves through this process. She excels in helping clients find an authentic identity within their multi-cultural reality and build the connection skills both within and without their relationships and communities.
She speaks and writes English and Mandarin fluently, and has a working knowledge of Cantonese.
Cecilia lives the same way she wants her clients to do. She never stops acquiring knowledge and building new habits that could help facilitate understanding of the self, and most importantly strengthen the relationship between our bodies, minds, and with others and our environment. As someone who was born and raised to be highly sensitive, she knows firsthand the internal chaos that could haunt our daily reality. It has taken her decades to learn how to collaborate with her own body, emotion and thoughts so she could maximize the potential in each moment for joy, productivity and love. It is her lifetime mission to share the knowledge she has acquired and continue to collect with her clients.
Cecilia works with clients exclusively online at this time. She will begin to take in person clients in 2027 only.
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To reach Cecilia directly contact her at cecilia@saratogatherapygroup.com
