Meet the Team
Jessica Bany, LMFT
Jessica is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with nearly 20 years of clinical experience, specializing in helping people heal from trauma so they can feel present, grounded and connected in their lives.
She is a trained Internal Family Systems clinician and in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) — two approaches that work powerfully together. IFS helps you to understand and befriend the parts of yourself that have been driving your struggles, while EMDR helps your nervous system process and release what's been stuck. Together they create real, lasting change — not just insight, but genuine healing. And neither approach treats you as broken. They start with the belief that you already have everything you need within you.
Jessica has walked her own healing path. In 2023, she experienced a serious trauma of her own — a mountain bike accident that left her hospitalized and forced her to face acute trauma, fear and the hard work of self acceptance from the inside out. The journey changed her as a person and clinician. She brings that lived experience into the room with every client.
Outside the office, you'll find her on the trails with her Springer Spaniel, driving her classic Mustang, at the SLO city farm where her husband farms, or thrift shopping with her son. She is deeply rooted in the SLO community and grateful for it.
Most of us have hit a season of life that looks nothing like the one we pictured — the college acceptance, the promotion, the family we imagined. You feel like you should be handling it fine. You're not. And you're worried that saying so out loud might be too much for the people who love you.
I know what that's like from the inside. There was a period in my own life when I needed support outside the people closest to me — not because they weren't there for me, but because I needed space to find my own answers instead of everyone else's advice. That experience taught me things no class could: how to sit with discomfort instead of rushing past it, how to actually build skills instead of just talking about wanting to, and how much easier things get once you stop performing "fine" for the people around you.
That's the work I love most now — with young adults (18–26) figuring out who they are outside of who they were raised to be, and with LGBTQIA+ clients navigating identity, relationships, or family dynamics that don't always make room for the full truth of who they are.
If you're carrying more than you're letting on, or you're not even sure what's wrong — just that something is — my door is open. In our sessions, you don't have to earn your seat or ration what you bring in. I want you to leave feeling like someone actually gets it, and like you get yourself a little better too.
“You don't need to have it figured out before you walk in. Let's figure it out together. I've got you.”
Alex is a recent transplant from San Diego, and she's loving calling the SLO area home. Outside the office, you'll usually find her doing something that helps her recenter — walking with her rescue pup, Rosie; hiking; practicing yoga or Pilates; or kayaking through Morro Bay with her family. She's also an avid reader with a soft spot for corny TV game shows.
Alex Weir, AMFT
Amy Maier, AMFT
It was watching her mother carry the weight of her father’s slow decline with Alzheimer’s disease that catalyzed Amy in her decades long path to becoming a therapist. She had already spent years in the helper role, both personally and professionally, supporting friends and clients through break-ups, mental health struggles, major life transitions, grief and loss. She saw firsthand how often people face their hardest moments alone, and how much less alone that pain feels when someone bears witness to it. Later, her own experience in therapy, including working through divorce, single motherhood, and reinventing her life in midlife, taught her the profound difference it makes to be met with real understanding. Now she brings that same presence to every client who walks through her door. If you want a therapist who can hold space while you process the inevitable, painful transitions life has in store, Amy is a good fit for you.
Maybe that looks like facing an empty nest just as you're stepping into caregiving for an aging parent who lives far away or the consistent 2am jolt awake, running through finances, feeling the strain in relationships that used to feel steady, wondering what the next chapter is supposed to look like. Amy knows this territory well, not just clinically but from 15 years spent working in hospice, sitting with people and families through their most intense grief. That experience shaped how she holds space for loss, transition, and the disorientation of a life that no longer looks the way you it once did.
Clients often describe her presence as calming and welcoming, one that invites them to bring their most authentic self into the room. One moment stays with her: a client who had spent a lifetime believing they were "a burden" — a label handed to them in childhood — came to realize instead, "I was a child who needed more than I was given." In that instant, the story shifted from "I was a burden" to "I was treated as if I were one." Watching that kind of reframe happen in real time is why Amy does this work.
Amy has kept a daily meditation and gentle movement practice for over 25 years. Time in nature and spontaneous kitchen dance parties to 80's music round out how she recharges — and that same groundedness, presence, and permission to be fully human is what she brings into session with you.
