Editor's Note

But How Does That Make You Feel?

Alexander Marshi, MA, AMFT, LA-CAMFT Voices Newsletter Editor

Welcome to the October 2026 edition of Voices, and to my first issue as Newsletter Editor.

Taking on this role has given me a new appreciation for how much quiet work sustains a professional community like ours. I want to begin by thanking President Jenni June Villegas Wilson, Web Admin Gina Balit, and the rest of the LA-CAMFT leadership team for trusting me with a small piece of it. I am very glad to be here.

For a profession built on connection, therapy can be strangely isolating work. We spend hours each day in conversations we are legally obligated not to repeat, and a week often passes between one fifty-minute exploration of a person’s inner world and the next. The work is fascinating and fulfilling, but it rarely feels communal, even though we know thousands of colleagues within a few miles of us are spending their days in rooms much like ours.

That is part of what makes a community like LA-CAMFT matter.

Voices gives those of us who listen for a living a place to speak: to exchange ideas, hear what our peers are experiencing, keep track of changes in the professional landscape, and, for once, get up from the listener’s chair to address a crowd of colleagues.

This month’s issue offers a few versions of that connection.

President Jenni Wilson takes us back to our 2026 Summer Picnic in the Park at Cheviot Hills, where nearly a hundred members gathered on an afternoon when Los Angeles apparently decided networking should double as heat exposure. There was food, volleyball, cornhole, art, and conversation, and, perhaps most importantly, the chance to meet one another as people rather than names attached to credentials or squares on a Zoom screen.

Professional community also means paying collective attention to something complicated before it becomes urgent. California’s possible transition to the AMFTRB National Exam is one of those things. CAMFT continues to advocate around the proposed change, the Board of Behavioral Sciences meets again in November, and pre-licensed clinicians understandably want to know what a transition could mean for people at different stages of licensure. We take a practical look at what is known, what remains undecided, and what associates should watch for next.

Our Member Spotlight features Associate MFT Nicholas Ragano, whose introduction to LA-CAMFT began with a comical misunderstanding at his first networking event and nevertheless (or perhaps partly because of it) left him feeling almost immediately that he had found his professional home.

Calling All Voices: Write for Us

A newsletter called Voices should probably contain as many of them as possible.

One of my goals as Editor is to make this publication a place where members bring forward what they are actually thinking about in their work. You don’t need to have invented a new modality or settled some enormous clinical question. Maybe you noticed something the hundredth time it happened in session. Maybe a paper changed how you understand a familiar problem. Maybe there is an ethical question you keep turning over, a population whose needs deserve more serious discussion, or something you wish someone had told you as an associate.

Those are all reasons to write.

We welcome submissions on clinical practice, ethics, research and literature, professional development, and personal reflections from the field. We also welcome Member Spotlight nominations, since some of the people doing the most interesting work in our community are unlikely to nominate themselves.

If you have an idea, review our submission guidelines or reach out directly. It does not need to arrive fully formed. Part of an editor’s job, conveniently enough, is editing.

My hope is that Voices becomes less a publication issued by an organization to its members and more an ongoing conversation among the people who make up that membership.

Most of us spend an extraordinary amount of time asking others how things make them feel. This is one place where I hope more of us will answer that question ourselves.

Alexander Marshi, MA, AMFT #159153, is a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist providing psychotherapy at Integrated Therapy and Recovery under licensed supervision, with a clinical focus on couples therapy, relational communication, and family systems. He is trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples and Gottman Method Couples Therapy (Levels 1 and 2), and serves as Editor of LA-CAMFT’s Voices. Learn more at alexmarshi.com.