Mercedes Oromendia, Ph.D.

About Dr. Mercedes

Dr. Mercedes Oromendia works with couples trying to stay a team instead of just coexisting, teens navigating the hardest stretch of growing up, and young adults adjusting to life without the structure that used to carry them.

With couples, the pattern is rarely one big crisis. More often it’s drifting into feeling like roommates, the same fight that keeps resurfacing without resolution, or sensing a major transition coming — marriage, parenthood, or an empty nest — and wanting to get ahead of it. Trained in the Gottman Method (Level 2) and attachment-based approaches, she helps couples repair specific patterns or simply strengthen a partnership that’s otherwise working well. She has particular depth with couples becoming parents, drawing on her background in family and teen development to help partners stay connected through that shift, but her couples work spans every stage of a relationship, not just the early parenting years.

With teens, she’s often brought in when conflict at home has become the primary mode of communication. She has worked with a wide range of students across numerous LA-area schools, often collaborating with several, including Oakwood and New Roads, on workshops that help parents and students prepare to thrive beyond high school.

With young adults, and the parents supporting them from a distance, the focus is on building what she calls an open nest rather than an empty one, helping the family relationship evolve rather than end. She works with young adults adjusting to the loss of structure that previously organized their lives, often continuing with them as they move from college into the transition to adult life.

Before returning to private practice, Dr. Mercedes served as Chief Clinical Officer at Manatee, a national pediatric mental health company, where she built and scaled a clinical program, an experience that still shapes how she structures treatment today. She works with patients in English, Spanish, and Portuguese and draws on firsthand experience living internationally. She is part of MHI’s collaborative model, working alongside psychiatry, psychology, and assessment specialists to ensure coordinated care.

Dr. Mercedes holds a Ph.D. in Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology from UC Santa Barbara. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, and earned her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is trained in the Gottman Method (Level 2), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), Attachment-Based Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). Dr. Mercedes is licensed in California and New York.