About
Francesca Maximé
There is a particular kind of person who finds their way to this work.
They have built something real: a career, a body of work, a life that looks, from the outside, like it's working. They are used to being the capable one. And they are carrying something that none of that capability has been able to resolve.
Francesca Maximé has been in the room with those people for most of her adult life. First as a television journalist embedded in the worlds of power, politics, and public visibility, and for the past fifteen years as a mental health clinician.
She works at a rare intersection: the clinical depth of a licensed psychotherapist trained in extensive somatic and relational modalities, combined with an insider fluency in the worlds her clients actually inhabit. High achievement, professional pressures, visibility, immigrant ascent, the specific relational weight of building an extraordinary life.
As a Haitian-Dominican Italian-American practitioner, she brings to this work a cultural and embodied understanding of what it means to carry multiple worlds simultaneously, and the toll that goes unaddressed when there's no space to put them down. For certain people, at certain moments, an hour a week isn't enough. The intensive format exists for exactly that.
THE FORMATION
Before the clinical work, there was a different kind of training.
Francesca graduated from Harvard University with a degree in English Literature: a formation in language, narrative, and the way stories shape how people understand themselves. What followed was a career that put her inside the worlds her clients now come from. Fortune 500 sales, addressing bank presidents and executive teams across the country. Over a decade as a television news anchor and correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Bloomberg, NY1, and FOX, reporting live from 9/11, Occupy Wall Street, and international conflicts, interviewing heads of state, cultural figures, and artists — among them George Bush, Mike Bloomberg, Richard Gere, Alicia Keys, Zoe Saldana, Gloria Steinem, and Billie Jean King — and at one point pulling 9 G's in an F-16 with the Air Force Thunderbirds.
She arrived at clinical training not from the outside looking in, but having already lived at the intersection of high performance, public visibility, and the pressure to hold it together.
The clinical formation that followed was rigorous and deliberately chosen: a Master's in Clinical Social Work from Fordham, training in Somatic Experiencing under Peter Levine's institute, Internal Family Systems certification, Relational Life Therapy under Terry Real, Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy, and a two-year IMTA-accredited mindfulness teacher certification program with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, under whom she has also sat in silent retreat for several months cumulatively.
The through-line across all of it: a commitment to working where change actually happens — in the nervous system, in the relational field, not just in conversation.
In Francesca's Words
Philosophy.
Most people want to know they're okay. That they're loved, lovable, accepted — that they have a right to exist, that they matter. That they won't die alone.
What shapes whether we believe that, long before we can name it, is the imprinting of environment, ancestry, culture, childhood. Most of us are running patterns we can't fully see, that affect how each person's brain is wired, what it predicts, and how it copes with day-to-day stressors.
Most couples come to me in distress with shame and blame: pointing fingers at each other, wanting the other person to change. What often comes up is that two people who once chose each other start to feel emotionally unsafe around one another.
Nobody teaches us how to be relational, unless we had great modeling, which many of us didn't. But it's a learnable skill. It starts with understanding your own history, learning to restore nervous system regulation, and discovering what genuine repair actually looks like and how to do it.
There is a way forward. I can help. Intensives can ignite that change.
— Francesca
Approach
The Somatic Relational Method.
After fifteen years of clinical work, I've developed a three-phase framework that anchors every engagement: the Somatic Relational Method. The work moves through three movements that, together, reach what insight alone cannot.
The modalities that anchor this work.
Somatic Experiencing
Developed by Peter Levine. Addresses what talk therapy alone cannot: the places where the body has absorbed what the mind has been trying to manage.
Internal Family Systems
Developed by Richard Schwartz. Creates a language for the internal dynamics that show up in every relationship: the parts that protect, the parts that carry old pain, the parts that drive behavior that no longer serves.
Relational Life Therapy
Developed by Terry Real. Addresses the patterns that couples bring into the room: the dance of grandiosity and shame, the inherited models of connection and disconnection.
Intimacy from the Inside Out
The IFS relational model. Guides courageous conversations that create space for both the listener and the speaker.
The goal is not to stop at understanding. The goal is to keep going until something shifts, from the inside out.
Body of Work
Beyond the therapeutic work
Podcast
The Rerooted Podcast
As host on Ram Dass's Be Here Now Network — sixty-one episodes in long-form conversation with the defining voices in trauma, attachment, and relational healing.
Writing
Poetry and Prose
Author of Rooted: A Verse Memoir (NYQ Books, 2012) and ReRouted: Verse for the Human Animal (2013) — 2019 first prize winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. Her writing has always moved between the personal and the political, the somatic and the narrative.
Book
In Progress
Currently writing a book about somatic relational therapy — bringing the framework she uses in the intensive work to the page for the first time.
Endorsements
In the words of colleagues and mentors.
"Francesca does beautiful work. She connects healing that is both deep and personal together with healing the collective, eyes wide open to the structural suffering of our world. Her extensive training and accomplishments help open minds and hearts to new possibilities. Francesca has been dedicating herself to compassion and awakening, and it shows."
Jack Kornfield, PhD
Co-founder, Insight Meditation Society · Founder, Spirit Rock Meditation Center
"I've known Francesca for many years. Her commitment to the welfare of others is profound and unshakeable. With deep personal integrity and clinical experience and skill, she has helped and will help many, many people. Plus she is funny, super smart, full of moxie, enthusiastic, and a joy to be with."
Rick Hanson, PhD
Author, Buddha's Brain · Senior Fellow, UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center
"Francesca integrates an embodied sense of one's essential self, grounded in mindful curiosity, which enables her to help clients lean into uncomfortable areas while holding a grounded, connected and relational space. I have learned a lot personally and clinically from Francesca's antiracism work and it has helped me grow as a person, clinician and trainer."
Diane Poole Heller, PhD
Author, The Power of Attachment · Founder, DARe
Credentials
- Harvard AB, English Literature · Fordham MSW
- Licensed Clinical Social Worker, New York, Massachusetts, Florida
- Certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, all levels 1–3
- Certified Internal Family Systems Practitioner, all levels 1–3 · IFIO
- Certified in Relational Life Therapy, all levels 1–3, trained directly under Terry Real
- Certified Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy Practitioner
- IMTA-accredited Mindfulness Meditation Teacher, trained under Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach
- Member, Institute of Coaching at McLean, Harvard Medical School Affiliate
- Recipient, ISTSS Advocacy and Service Award
- Award-winning Poet and Author
Client Voices
"I have been in more traditional types of therapy for the past 14 years, but Francesca's method has been more effective for me than any others I've tried. I feel a deep sense of calm and trust. She has helped me integrate my plant medicine practices and weave all of my healing techniques into a beautiful blanket."
Carolyn C. — Coaching Client
"Healing is not easy in the way I thought it would be but it is rigorous and connective and helps clear the mist that may be clouding you from achieving inner peace. I would definitely recommend that others work with Francesca."
Sara S. — Coaching Client