MEET CHRIS
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.​Chris Araujo-Helms is a National Certified Counselor (NCC) and pre-licensed clinician  who focuses on helping people make sense of relational patterns, grief, and life's bigger-picture transitions. She works with individuals who find themselves caught in cycles of disconnection, overfunctioning, or feeling responsible for everyone else's emotions, and who long for deeper connection but aren't sure how to get there.

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With training across attachment-based, somatic, and parts-work approaches, Chris has become known for creating a space that honors the story behind a client's patterns rather than judging them — helping clients unpack relational dynamics, process difficult emotions, and find their own path forward.

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What Makes Chris's Approach Different

Clients come to Chris feeling defined by patterns that don't actually begin with them — patterns shaped by attachment experiences, family legacies, and the ways their nervous system adapted to navigate relationships and the world around them.

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Chris uses an integrative therapeutic approach, primarily drawing on attachment theory, Relational-Cultural Theory, and Internal Family Systems within somatic and multicultural frameworks. She helps clients understand how their relationships, emotions, body, and protective parts work together, then provides the support and practical tools to build nervous system flexibility and reconnect with their own wisdom. Chris pays close attention to how family legacies, cultural messages, and broader systems of power and belonging shape a person's experiences, and she prioritizes helping clients decide which parts of their inherited blueprint to keep and which to release.

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Chris has particular expertise supporting clients exploring queer identity, spirituality, and the ways the two intersect.  She approaches this work with both clinical grounding and lived understanding as a white, cisgender, queer-identifying, spiritually-informed woman.

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Her Specialties Include:​

• Anxiety, depression, and self-compassion work

• Past experiences and intergenerational patterns

• Grief and anticipatory grief

• Spiritual deconstruction and integration

• Relational dynamics and attachment wounds

• Life transitions and identity exploration

• Young adulthood 

• Women and gender-expansive persons

• BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ individuals

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Evidence-Based Training

Chris is trained in Internal Family Systems (Parts Work), bringing an attachment-informed, somatic lens to her work with relational and intergenerational patterns.

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Her Role at D.I.V.E.

Chris is one of the core D.I.V.E. therapists, bringing past her experience in crisis intervention, group facilitation, and community mental health to her therapy practice.

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Beyond the Office

When she’s not with clients, Chris can be found chasing down whatever seasonal drink or menu item just dropped at her favorite coffee shop or restaurant.  She’s an easy sell on anything limited-time.