Ariel Grusky Foley

Ariel Grusky Foley is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Santa Cruz, seeing teens, young adults, and adults at her Mission Street office and by telehealth across California. Her practice is built around trauma — specifically, trauma that has stopped being a memory and started shaping how someone gets through an ordinary day.

The clients she works with are often high-acuity: people carrying past experiences that surface as anxiety, depression, self-harm, or emotional overwhelm, alongside a set of coping patterns that once made sense and no longer do. The pattern is where she puts her attention. She validates what a client has actually lived through, and then names what they are building around it, so the role that pattern plays becomes something they can see and decide about rather than something that simply happens to them. Her word for what that creates is autonomy.

She is trained in EMDR through Level II and uses it to process traumatic experience directly rather than manage around it. Her own description of the work is plain: bilateral stimulation and eye-movement techniques to speed up the processing of a specific past event, with the goal of being able to engage with that event at a low or minimal level of dysregulation. Alongside EMDR she draws on attachment-based work, CBT, DBT, and trauma-informed practice, and brings play therapy into her work with younger clients.

Her style is direct and challenging, and she says so up front — she describes herself as blunt, and as meeting clients without judgment. Alongside trauma she works with anxiety, depression, body image and disordered eating, teens navigating the tension that comes with adolescence and family life, and men in mental health. On that last group she is explicit: the therapy experience is different for men, who are often taught early that emotions are shameful or unimportant, and the room has to account for that before anything else can happen.

Ariel earned her B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Education from UC Santa Cruz in 2018 and her M.A. in Marriage and Family Therapy from Palo Alto University in 2022, and completed EMDR training, Levels I and II, in 2023. She worked as a preschool teacher before graduate school, and during her master's she worked with foster children in rural California — an experience she credits with showing her how much systemic change the work still needs. She is licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist in California.