Licensed psychologist, Texas PSY #36929 · Clinical director
Elena Riedo, Psy.D.Licensed psychologist, CSAT, EMDR therapistFull Circle Recovery
CSATCertified Sex Addiction Therapist
EMDRtherapist
PITPia Mellody Post-Induction Therapy
Elena Riedo, Psy.D., is a licensed psychologist and clinical director of Psychology Care Associates. Dr. Riedo has worked with adults for more than twenty-five years: in county jails and state facilities, in inner-city clinics, in hospitals, and in private practice. Adults come to her when sexual behavior has become unmanageable, when infidelity has blown a life open, when trauma or PTSD will not settle, and when a veteran or a family is carrying injury from deployment as well as from home. They also come with the rest of adult life: anxiety that has taken the week, a depression that will not lift, trauma that has been sitting with them for years.
She is a psychologist first. CSAT training shapes this specialty. It does not limit who can call.
Training and the path here
Dr. Riedo was born in northern Italy, under the Dolomites, and still thinks in mountains. The academic path was American: a Bachelor of Science from the University of Southern California (USC), then a master’s and a Psy.D. at the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles, now Alliant International University.
The early clinical years were not quiet private offices. She trained and worked in Los Angeles County forensic programs, including Twin Towers Correctional Facility—the jail that, by the size of its psychiatric population, has long functioned as one of the largest mental-health settings in the country. She worked in inner-city community mental health clinics in South Central Los Angeles, then later in the mental health department at Dallas State Jail through the University of Texas Medical Branch—the same appointment, forensic work inside a state facility. Inpatient hospitals, outpatient clinics, and community settings sit in the same history. Southlake has been home for twenty years, and the place of her private practice for fifteen.
The specialty training was chosen the same way the settings were: for what the work actually required.
CSAT, through IITAP, in the programs developed by Patrick Carnes, Ph.D.: assessment and treatment of sexual addiction, pornography addiction, infidelity, and the injury to the partner.
EMDR, with additional use of urge-focused protocols such as DeTUR when the evaluation supports them.
Post-Induction Therapy (PIT) with Pia Mellody: developmental trauma, family-of-origin injury, and the patterns that keep repeating in adult intimacy.
Training developed by the Center for Deployment Psychology for civilian clinicians who see service members, veterans, and their adult family members: deployment stress, combat-related PTSD, sleep, substance use, and the strain a tour can put on a marriage.
Certification to administer the 16PF (Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire), Raymond Cattell’s instrument for normal-range personality. It maps how a person typically thinks, relates, solves problems, and holds up under pressure. In career coaching that picture is useful: person–job fit, a change of field after a life has been interrupted, leadership style, and the difference between “I cannot do this work” and “this work was never built for how I am made.”
The work
Some of the calls are a second phone, a history of pornography, a double life. A partner in shock. A veteran who is not sleeping. Some of the calls are quieter, and no less serious: anxiety, depression, grief, trauma that has been carried for a long time. Plenty of the adults in this practice are here because the week has become unlivable. The first task is the same. A clear evaluation and a plan, not a slogan.
Sexual addiction, pornography addiction, infidelity, and betrayal
CSAT work is supervised training in the behavior, the secrecy, and the wreckage it leaves in a partnership. The work can include the adult whose sexual behavior has run past their own limits, the partner after discovery, and the couple when both can do structured work. Disclosure, safety, and betrayal trauma are part of that lane, not an afterthought.
Dr. Riedo treats trauma and PTSD, including combat-related PTSD and the older injury that often sits under addiction. EMDR is used when the evaluation supports it: a structured way of working with memories that have stayed too loud, without requiring the whole story to be told at length. PIT training informs the developmental work underneath that. What is EMDR
Anxiety, depression, and the rest of adult life
Licensed psychology is not only specialty work. Dr. Riedo sees adults for anxiety, depression, grief, and trauma: a life that has gotten tight, a mood that will not move, a past that keeps arriving uninvited. That work is held to the same standard: assessment, and a method that fits.
Service members and veterans
Dr. Riedo sees veterans, service members, and adult family members for deployment-related and combat-related psychological injury: posttraumatic stress disorder and other trauma responses, combat and operational stress, depression and suicide risk, sleep disturbance, substance use, traumatic brain injury when it sits beside the behavioral health picture, addiction and sexual compulsivity, military sexual trauma, and the particular strain a deployment and reintegration can put on a marriage and an adult household. Behind that work is training developed by the Center for Deployment Psychology for civilian clinicians who treat service members, veterans, and their families across the deployment cycle, including military culture, evidence-informed approaches to combat-related PTSD, and the family impact of a tour.
NBC 5 Dallas–Fort Worth
NBC 5 asked Dr. Riedo to speak as a clinical psychologist on high-speed online pornography, and on the conversation parents have with children. NBC 5 article.
