Sergio Rodriguez Castillo

Sergio Rodriguez-Castillo, JD, LLM, MA, has trained in Mexico, the United Kingdom, India and the U.S. He received his MA in Integral Counseling Psychology from CIIS, completed his JD at the Faculty of Law of the Queretaro State's University (Mexico) and earned LL.M. from the University of Warwick's School of Law (UK).

As a professor, he has served as core or adjunct faculty in various institutions of higher education in Mexico: the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), the Contemporary Education University Center (CUDEC) and the Queretaro State's University. He regularly runs retreats, workshops and training programs in Mexico in topics such as psychotherapy and spirituality, nonviolent communication, mindfulness-based stress reduction, sexuality, grief and rebuilding oneself after the end of a love relationship. He is also the author of the Survival guide to Psychotherapy and Jesus in the Times of Freud, a book on psychotherapy and Catholicism, soon to be published in Mexico. Currently he teaches Transpersonal Psychotherapy, Therapeutic Communications, Couples and Marriage Counseling and Integrative Seminar.

His therapeutic work is influenced by different schools, particularly Existential, Gestalt, Humanistic and Transpersonal; informed by systems and psychodynamic theories and awareness of the body and thought processes; combining traditional, contemporary and complementary approaches to healing. He currently sees clients at the Integral Counseling Center on Church Street in San Francisco.

Being a Latino bilingual male with a background in law allows him to better understand the type of problems faced by minorities, particularly the Chicano/Latino community while being aware of the diversity issues and legal constraints and requirements usually inherent to their situation, having the sensitivity to work through problems of domestic violence, abuse, and addictions. He worked as a clinician at the Instituto Familiar de la Raza, one of the leading mental health centers for the Latino population in the Bay Area. Before coming to CIIS, Sergio had a private practice in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, working with a culturally diverse population in a variety of clinical issues, including trauma, sexual orientation, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, grief; as well as diversity and relationships matters.

Sergio's fields of interest are diverse and informed by his professional and personal background and spiritual path, including the potential rich interface between Catholicism and psychotherapy, the application of entheogens and NOSCs to therapeutic work, the exploration of ways to reduce the splitting between spirituality and the corporate world in our time, and what he likes to call "el regreso de Quetzalcoatl" that is, the North-South integration and contribution of America's native traditions to psychotherapy. He welcomes contact from people interested in these fields to further promote their study and development. 

• srodriguez-castillo@ciis.edu

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