Kimberly Otero, M.A., is an advanced doctoral candidate at the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi University. She is currently completing her dissertation, examining the negative psychological effects that immigrant children experience following forced familial separation. She completed her pre-doctoral internship training at Elmhurst Hospital, where she provided services to children, adolescents, and adults across multiple settings including inpatient psychiatric units, the psychiatric emergency room, and the community outpatient clinic. Through the outpatient clinic, she provided individual therapy and co-led two outpatient groups, primarily focused on anxiety, depression, and bereavement related to COVID-19. As part of her doctoral training, Kimberly also worked within a variety of clinical settings including SCO Family of Services, a residential treatment facility for adolescents and young adults with developmental delays, severe emotional disturbance, and complex trauma histories; Nassau University Medical Center, a community hospital providing inpatient and outpatient psychiatric services to residents of lower socio-economic neighborhoods; and Adelphi University’s outpatient psychotherapy clinic.

Kimberly is psychodynamically oriented in her clinical thinking and conceptualization, and she incorporates systemic, cultural, and personal factors when working with each individual patient. She also highly values the importance of trauma-informed treatment and works to consider trauma histories within her conceptualizations. Moreover, she integrates psycho-education, behavioral, and mindfulness-oriented techniques throughout her treatments, while keeping the larger context of her patients’ unique life-experiences as her central framework for clinical thinking.