Founder & Clinical Director
Samuel Gonzalez, LMFT
California Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
License No. 45661
A Career Dedicated to Helping Young People and Families
I began working with children, adolescents, and young adults in 2001, and over the years, I have had the privilege of supporting young people and families through an extraordinary range of experiences, challenges, transitions, and stages of growth.
What has kept me connected to this work for more than 25 years is the young people themselves. I continue to be inspired by their resilience, honesty, individuality, humor, and remarkable capacity for growth, even during periods when they may struggle to recognize those qualities within themselves.
My years as a therapist have also taught me that helping a young person requires more than clinical knowledge alone. It requires patience, curiosity, flexibility, and above all, the willingness to build a genuine relationship. Every young person deserves to feel that the therapist working with them is interested not simply in what is wrong, but in understanding who they are.
That belief has shaped my work throughout my career and ultimately became one of the guiding principles behind FLORA Youth & Young Adult Counseling.
Why I Founded FLORA
Creating the Kind of Practice I Believe Young People Deserve
After more than two decades of working with young people and families, I wanted to create a practice that reflected what those years had taught me about how meaningful therapy happens.
I wanted young people to experience counseling as something more personal than simply attending an appointment, a place where they could develop a genuine relationship with their therapist, feel that their perspective mattered, and receive care shaped around who they are rather than being asked to fit into a predetermined model.
FLORA grew from that vision: a specialized practice where clinical experience, genuine connection, flexibility, and highly personalized care come together. A practice designed specifically around the developmental needs of adolescents, teens, and young adults, and one that recognizes the important role families can play while respecting each young person's growing independence.
I also wanted to build a practice where these principles could extend beyond the work of any one therapist, a team of clinicians who share a commitment to understanding young people as individuals, building genuine therapeutic relationships, and providing thoughtful care while bringing their own strengths and clinical expertise to the work.
I created FLORA to provide the kind of thoughtful, individualized care I have come to believe young people deserve and to build a practice where that commitment can continue to grow.
Experience That Shapes the Work
More Than 25 Years of Clinical Practice
Over the course of my career, I have worked with children, adolescents, young adults, parents, and families across a wide range of clinical settings and circumstances. Each experience has deepened my understanding of the emotional, relational, and developmental challenges young people can face and reinforced the importance of seeing the whole person rather than simply the problem that brought them to therapy.
My work has included supporting young people experiencing anxiety, depression, family conflict, behavioral and emotional challenges, relationship difficulties, major life transitions, grief, trauma, and other complex circumstances. I have also spent many years working alongside parents and families, helping them better understand and support the young people in their lives.
Working with such a wide range of young people and families has also taught me never to assume that experience means I already know someone's story. I may bring decades of clinical perspective into the room, but every therapeutic relationship begins with listening, learning, and understanding the individual in front of me.
Experience provides perspective. Every young person still deserves to be understood as an individual.