Supervised by Nicole Nardon, LMFT, LPCC #41393
At A Place to Turn, we are honored to welcome Jocelyn Pons, MA, MBA, Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, to our Pasadena clinical team. Jocelyn brings a distinctive combination of clinical training, professional leadership experience, cultural perspective, and lived experience to the therapeutic relationship. She works with adults, children, and couples navigating relationship concerns, anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, identity, life transitions, and the deeper questions that often emerge when the ways we have learned to live no longer feel sustainable.
Jocelyn’s therapeutic style is compassionate, affirming, and insight-oriented. She creates a supportive environment where clients can feel genuinely heard while also being invited into honest reflection and deeper self-understanding. Rather than focusing only on symptoms, Jocelyn helps clients become curious about where patterns began and why they may have once been necessary.
Using a family-systems lens, person-centered therapy, and attunement to inner child work, Jocelyn helps clients explore how childhood experiences, relationships, family dynamics, cultural messages, and past experiences may continue to influence present-day behaviors, communication, boundaries, self-worth, and choices. Through this process, clients can begin to understand themselves with greater compassion while developing new ways of relating to themselves and the people around them.
Before becoming a therapist, Jocelyn spent more than 25 years working in corporate finance, including senior leadership roles. She also holds an MBA, giving her a firsthand understanding of the pressures that can exist beneath professional success.
She understands the expectations many high-achieving professionals carry—to perform, provide, lead, solve problems, remain dependable, and hold everything together. Over time, those strengths can come with a cost, particularly when achievement leaves little room for vulnerability, rest, relationships, or connection to self.
Jocelyn provides a space where professionals can step outside their roles and explore the person underneath the performance. She supports clients navigating burnout, career transitions, competing responsibilities, perfectionism, identity, relationships, and questions about what success and fulfillment mean at different stages of life.
As a Filipino American therapist, Jocelyn brings cultural humility and personal understanding to conversations about family, responsibility, identity, belonging, and intergenerational expectations. She recognizes that cultural values can be tremendous sources of strength, connection, resilience, and belonging while sometimes creating expectations that leave little room for individual needs.
Jocelyn has a particular understanding of immigrants and first-generation Asian Americans navigating the space between cultural or family expectations and an evolving sense of self. Therapy can become a place to explore how to honor family, heritage, and meaningful cultural values while also developing an identity and life that feel authentically one’s own.
She is also especially attuned to the experiences of eldest daughters, family caretakers, and individuals who learned early to be the dependable one. When being strong, responsible, or available to everyone else becomes deeply woven into identity, receiving care, establishing boundaries, asking for help, or prioritizing personal needs can feel unfamiliar—or even uncomfortable.
Jocelyn helps clients explore these patterns without criticizing the strengths that helped them become who they are. Instead, therapy creates an opportunity to ask whether those strengths can evolve so there is room for both responsibility and self-care, connection and boundaries, achievement and rest, caring for others and receiving care.
Jocelyn is particularly passionate about working with women navigating midlife—a season that can bring reevaluation, transition, loss, awakening, or an unexpected desire for something different.
Changes in career, marriage or relationships, parenting and family roles, caregiving responsibilities, identity, or priorities can raise deeper questions: Who am I beyond the roles I have carried? What do I want now? What belongs to me, and what have I inherited or learned to carry for others?
Jocelyn believes these moments do not simply represent disruption. They can become powerful opportunities for greater self-awareness, healing, choice, and personal growth.
Whether you are navigating relationships, family expectations, professional burnout, cultural identity, grief, trauma, midlife change, or simply recognizing that something in your life no longer feels aligned, Jocelyn offers a compassionate space to understand where you have been and intentionally consider what you want to carry forward.
📍 In-person in Pasadena, CA
💻 Virtual sessions available throughout California
Jocelyn is currently accepting new clients for in-person therapy at our Pasadena office as well as secure telehealth sessions throughout California. She welcomes adults, children, couples, women navigating midlife, high-achieving professionals, and clients exploring cultural and intergenerational experiences.
To schedule a session with Jocelyn, contact us at info@aplace2turn.com or call 818-643-1553.
📍 Begin your healing journey with Jocelyn in Pasadena, CA, or virtually from anywhere in California.
Jocelyn works with adults, children, and couples navigating anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, relationship concerns, identity, family dynamics, and major life transitions. She has particular interests in women in midlife, high-achieving professionals, immigrants and first-generation Asian Americans, eldest daughters, and family caretakers.
Jocelyn works from a family-systems and person-centered perspective with attunement to inner child work. She helps clients look beyond immediate symptoms to understand how childhood experiences, relationships, family dynamics, cultural expectations, and past experiences may influence current patterns, boundaries, communication, self-worth, and relationships.
Yes. With more than 25 years of experience in corporate finance and senior leadership, Jocelyn understands the pressures that can accompany professional achievement. She supports professionals navigating burnout, career transitions, competing responsibilities, relationships, identity, and the challenge of maintaining connection to self while carrying significant professional and personal demands.
Yes. As a Filipino American therapist, Jocelyn has a particular understanding of the complexities that can arise at the intersection of culture, family, identity, responsibility, and belonging. She welcomes immigrants, first-generation Asian Americans, and others who want to explore how cultural and family expectations intersect with their evolving sense of self.
Jocelyn understands how being the responsible or dependable person in a family can become deeply connected to identity. She helps clients explore patterns of over-responsibility and caretaking while learning to establish boundaries, receive support, recognize their own needs, and develop relationships that allow for greater reciprocity.
Yes. Jocelyn is passionate about supporting women in midlife who are reevaluating relationships, careers, family roles, identity, priorities, or what they want from the next chapter of their lives. She views these transitions as opportunities for deeper self-understanding and intentional growth.
Yes. Jocelyn offers in-person therapy in Pasadena, CA, as well as secure virtual therapy throughout California.
To schedule with Jocelyn, email info@aplace2turn.com or call 818-643-1553. Our intake team can answer your questions and help you find an appointment that fits your needs.
“Sometimes the roles that helped us become strong can also make it difficult to hear what we need. Therapy can create the space to understand what shaped you, honor what has carried you this far, and choose with greater freedom who you want to become.”
From anxiety and depression to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), we utilize holistic talk therapies and innovative treatments like eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR).
