Meet Christina Canuto

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christina Canuto a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Christina, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I come from parents who both had immigrant parents. Although I was closer to my paternal grandparents, I believe resilience was passed down generationally from the immigrant mentality of hard work, family-mindedness, and motivation to improve generational conditions. My dad comes from Filipino heritage and my mom comes from a Cherokee, Polish, Portuguese, and Dutch background. My Filipino grandparents, my lolo (grandfather) and lola (grandmother), played a huge role in raising me and I consider them my role models for resilience. My lolo joined the Navy through the Philippine Enlistment Program, which allowed my dad’s side a pathway to citizenship. My great-grandfather actually died in The Bataan Death March as a Filipino POW, and my grandparents also shared many stories of how the war affected their childhoods and young adulthoods. I consider much of my resilience to come from my Filipino lineage and the characteristics my grandparents instilled in me.

My paternal grandparents taught me so many cultural forms of Filipino resilience. Like many Filipinos, they used humor to embrace challenges and somehow found joy even when things were difficult. My grandmother, who looking back from my therapist lens likely had post-traumatic stress disorder, found ways to manage her deep anxieties through gardening, crocheting, praying, and movement. I have many memories of her climbing the calamansi tree in their backyard to retrieve the fruits, rather than simply using a ladder. My grandfather also managed many health issues through his deep passion for cooking and baking. Although terms like “mental health” and “emotion regulation” were not within his vocabulary, he never failed to offer me food as his love language. They also engrained in me the importance of relational support, as many Filipinos rely on extended family and friends during crises, rather than going through things alone. When problems happened, my grandparents were always there to support me, my brother, and our parents. From a young age, my grandparents shared stories of Japanese soldiers invading their village during WWII, and the hope and strength they exhibited despite these horrible events.

The resilience they gave me was the ability to recognize the privilege it is for me to be a US citizen, with access to education and vocational opportunities others don’t have. On days where I consider work hard or feel tired, I remember how hard they worked to build a life for our family here. I consider my work ethic and passion for helping others build strong relationships a way to honor their memories.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I help people learn to build mindfulness and compassion skills. I am a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Intuitive Eating Counselor, Mental Health Content Creator, and Creative Writer. Across all my work, I hope to share my deep gratitude for the human experience and all it offers.

As a therapist who works with individuals, couples, and families, I work within a relational lens to help people build stronger relationships with self and others. As an intuitive eating counselor, I provide individual and group therapy to guide people in uncovering their natural intuition around their needs for nutrition and movement.

My mental health content can be found on Choosing Therapy’s website, where I write evidence-based articles around OCD, trauma, eating disorders, and more. I also have a professional Instagram @christina_mft, where people can learn more about how to incorporate intuitive eating principles into daily life. I am currently documenting my training for a run from a body neutral lens, with the hope that my followers can understand how to incorporate movement and nutrition into the other intuitive eating principles.

As a creative writer, I host a personal writing group with some people from undergrad, write poetry and non-fiction in my spare time, and have received some writing scholarships and attended writing retreat. My creative writing is a personal space I am still exploring how to intertwine and I appreciate it is ever-evolving during my life transitions.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The three skills which have been most impactful to my journey are creativity, self-awareness, and compassion. Having attended arts schools for middle school, high school, and undergrad, creativity is a skill which has shown up in my life in different ways. Whether its hosting a creative writing group with old friends, thinking through a client treatment plan, or exploring diverse avenues of income, creativity has allowed me to think outside the box when I’ve needed to make moves in my career. Self-awareness is a skill which allows me to grow personally and professionally through being curious about what I need on a daily basis. Self-awareness allows me to regulate my emotions, have a routine self-care plan, and hold myself accountable when I’m not living through my core values. When I mention compassion, I mean the willingness to give yourself and others grace. As a therapist and writer, I’ve learned to view life through shades of gray. I’ve found that viewing situations through a compassionate and curious lens has helped me navigate both personal and professional conflicts.

If others are interested in honing skills like creativity, self-awareness, and compassion, I would say these skills have all been connected to different life experiences for me. For creativity, I always have at least one creative project I’m working on outside of work. Whether that is a poem, a crocheted item, a painting, or some ceramics, I seek out spaces and places where I can express myself creatively. As a therapist who has also sought my own therapy, I believe my self-awareness and insight largely comes from my willingness to make space for mental health resources. As for compassion, I have found that sitting and walking meditation have helped me access my compassion for not just myself, but for others as well.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I would love to connect with anyone who works from a body-neutral or health-at-every-size approach, or intertwines these lenses into their work. I provide groups with a colleague, Ashley Dail, LCMHC, where we use an intuitive eating and somatic therapy approach to help people foster better mind-body connection. We are always open to collaborate with other mental health professionals, or folks within the health and wellness field. They can find us on Instagram @christina_mft and @move.talk.zen and reach out through there.

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