JESSE ARVIZU, PSY.D. POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW
PSY.D. POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW
Supervised by Jack Tsan, Ph.D., Licensed Psychologist
I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Anxiety Treatment Center of Austin, working toward licensure here in Texas. Before psychology, I spent seven years in the U.S. Navy — an early education in stress, resilience, and what it takes to keep functioning under pressure.
I earned my doctorate from Adler University and trained at the VA North Texas Health Care System, where I worked across some of its most demanding settings — inpatient psychiatry, a residential treatment program, specialized trauma care, and general outpatient care. There I treated anxiety, depression, and trauma using structured, research-supported protocols, and I learned to do that work as part of an interdisciplinary team rather than on my own.
That work built on years of earlier experience in very different environments — K–12 schools, college counseling centers, first responders, and community care. Across all of it, the throughline was the same: people carry what they're going through in very different ways, and the work depends on meeting each person where they actually are. Over time, that's what drew my focus to anxiety, depression, and trauma — and at ATCA I'm deepening that work, with a growing focus on exposure-based therapy for anxiety and OCD.
My Treatment Philosophy
I think of anxiety as something like a smoke detector: it has a function, and it isn't meant to be torn out of the ceiling. The same alarm sounds for burnt toast as for a real fire — so the work isn't to silence it, but to look honestly at how we respond when it goes off, and to adjust from there.
I practice integratively, but deliberately so. I'm grounded in evidence-based methods — cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, exposure-based approaches, and mindfulness — and I draw on them to fit the person in front of me, rather than asking the person to fit the method. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to people; if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Beneath the techniques, my orientation is humanistic and existential, and much of the real work is simply realigning with what you actually value.
I try to challenge as much as I support. I'm less interested in telling people what they want to hear than in asking the question that opens something up, because that's usually where change begins. I consider this work a privilege — people's paths matter, and walking alongside someone for a stretch of theirs is something I take seriously.
I especially welcome people who are skeptical of therapy: those who figure they should be able to handle things on their own, or who worry their situation is too tangled to be understood. You don't have to be in crisis to begin. Therapy can be a bit like maintenance for a vehicle — sometimes you come in to keep things tuned, sometimes you come in once the warning light has been on a while. Either way, the work is worth doing.