Empowered, compassionate, expansive, and heart-centered therapy
empowering. compassionate. expansive. heart-centered. therapy
DANIEL
CORDUA
Hello, my name is Daniel. A wellness practitioner and healer for over 16 years, I am an integrative therapist and passionate expert in therapy for individuals, couples therapy, therapy for men, and sex therapy. My goal is to help excavate and bridge your inner truth with your connection to others, to the world, and, most importantly, to your own self.
Leveraging compassion, creativity, curiosity, and a strengths-based perspective, I aim to help you identify your own unique path towards navigating your self, your life, and your relationships. We will nurture the awareness and practices you need to be in integrity with your deepest values, desires, and potential. In this collaborative process, I hold your autonomy, wisdom, and yearning for a life of authenticity, joy, and connection with the utmost care.
my approach.
My strengths-based and heart-centered approach affirms the truth, complexity, and wisdom found in all that is you.
Relationships are the foundation of our lives – especially our most intimate relationships and our relationship to our own self. When they are going well, the world seems like a brighter place of potential, similarly when they are rocky, they can darken many aspects of our lives and block our possibility.
Our therapy will work to move through those roadblocks in order to reveal and affirm the truth, complexity, and inner wisdom that is all of you, integrating it into your world via expansive ways.
This journey will bring us into exploring the many parts of who you are. We will dive deep into how these parts show up in your life and your relationships. Through this exploration you will get to know your Self - identities, desires, body, emotion, mind, and soul - and your patterns of connection or disconnection with the world, gaining clarity and growing in ways that feel authentic and empowering.
areas of specialization
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for couples/dyads + and individuals looking to heal, empower, and transform their relationships. By exploring patterns of communication, emotional needs, and attachment styles, connection deepens, intimacy builds, and challenges are navigated in a more collaborative and supportive way
Additionally, I support couples in enhancing emotional and sexual intimacy and becoming more present, secure and connected to both themselves and towards each other.
Other couples therapy areas of specialization include:
Healthy & Passionate Long Term Relationships & Partnerships
Conflict, Communication, & Emotional Attunement
Conscious Uncoupling
Monogamy, Non-Monogamy, and Polyamory
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Focuses on exploring and expanding the scripts and lived narratives of what it means to be a man. Through the process of therapy, men can explore themselves more fully, finding their own values, desires, and unique sense of self and identity in the process. This journey helps men develop a deeper understanding of themselves and their relationships, challenge confining norms, expand the possibility of who they can be, connect more profoundly to others, and build more fulfilling and authentic lives.
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via a biological, psychological, somatic, and social lens, sex therapy focuses on growing sexual expression, identity, and satisfaction; moving past roadblocks of sexual dysfunction or intimacy issues; and expanding our practice of love, aliveness, pleasure, and eroticism.
This includes work with both individuals and couples/dyads.
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Somatic therapy is starts with our embodied experience. Through practices that develop a deeper felt sense of our body’s wisdom, the client can start to develop resources and resilience from within - to process trauma, regulate emotions, feel more fully, and find joy, pleasure and potential. I integrate somatic therapy into all of my therapy and also see clients that focus solely on this type of work
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Learning to love ourselves can feel heavy and sometimes impossible. From a heart-centered, affirming, collaborative and compassionate space, and through helpful techniques and practices, therapy can help us feel in better relationship to our own self, our various identities, and to others, along with helping us find a sense of deeper worth and confidence from within.
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Therapy creates a nonjudgmental, expansive, and inspiring space to explore all of who you are, to move past stuck areas and uncover the jewels within the self that can provide empowerment, creativity, clarity, strength, and resilience within all areas of your life.
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People-pleasing and over-functioning are coping strategies that prioritize others' needs and emotions over one’s own and can often lead to resentment, exhaustion, and self-neglect.
People-Pleasing can take the form of constantly agreeing to requests you don't have the capacity for, over-apologizing, and struggling to say "no,” tying your self-worth to how happy or pleased others are with you.
Over-functioning can look like taking on the emotional or physical labor of others, such as fixing, micromanaging, and managing how others feel. Therapy helps us understand the roots of these patterns and validate their helpfulness, while at the same time allowing us to transform them into healthy, more balanced, and life-giving ways of relating.
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Anxiety is so common in our world. Through a holistic blend of mindfulness, yoga, somatic therapy, narrative therapy, and parts work, we collaborate on the tools required to calm the mind, focus, and ground into presence. This helps us manage our anxiety with more empowerment and lead a life of more integrity and possibility
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the exploration and understanding of early family experiences, dynamics, and relationships; how they shape us and how they still impact our attitudes towards ourself and how we show up in the world
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I offer trauma-informed care in all that I do. It is not always easy to identify trauma because most people who carry trauma aren’t validated in their experience or even aware that it or how it is is effecting their behaviors and viewpoint. At the same time, trauma can have a profound impact on our lives, shaping how we navigate relationships, cope with stress, and view ourselves and the world. Therapy can provide insight into how these experiences continue to affect the present and provide skills and practices to manage day-to-day stressors, seemingly out-of-control bodies, and important relationships more effectively
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Nearly half of women and more than 1 in 6 men have experienced some form of sexual abuse in their lives. Therapy is a collaborative process that provides a safe, supportive, and nonjudgmental environment to process your experience, explore how it impacts your life and relationships now, and practice tools to empower your relationship to your abuse, your sexuality, and yourself.
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Navigating our spiritual and/or religious yearnings in today’s world can be complicated. We may not feel that there is a safe, nonjudgmental space to be honest about our feelings, thoughts, and desires around spirituality or religion or a path that validates our needs. Therapy provides a space to explore, expand, and deepen our spiritual worldviews while navigating the social and intrapersonal roadblocks that may arise in our sacred journey.
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Spiritual abuse is a form of emotional and psychological harm inflicted by individuals or institutions who misuse their power and authority within a religious or spiritual context. It can involve manipulation, coercion, or the use of fear and shame to control others’ beliefs and behaviors, causing lasting trauma and damage to a person’s sense of self and faith. Furthermore, unhealthy narratives about ourselves and the world can often be internalized during adverse religious experiences. Therapy provides a needed and important space to recognize and address spiritual abuse in order to begin healing, reunite with our own inner wisdom, spirituality, intuition and insight… and to prevent further harm.
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As a human being, we will consistently encounter grief, loss, and changes throughout the many stages of our life - loss is a natural part of living and grief is the other side of our capacity to love. And at the same time, losing a loved one or a job or a time in our life can present us with intense feelings that are difficult to manage, roadblocks to our possibility, and a feeling of being stuck in our lives. Therapy can give us the compassionate space to be with our grief in helpful and healthy ways and tools to process, honor, and move forward from our losses towards what’s next.
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Our relationship to our sexual self and sexual desires often feel complex. We may hide parts of ourself because we feel competing emotions towards our desire or feel that society does not validate or accept our yearnings. Therapy provides a supportive, nonjudgmental, and compassionate space to explore your desires and process how they can live within your life in ways that are in integrity with your values,
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Compulsive sexual behavior is characterized by repetitive and intense preoccupations with sexual fantasies, urges, and behaviors that are distressing to the individual and/or result in psychosocial impairment. Therapy provides a safe, supportive space to explore these behaviors and develop skills to manage them in life-giving ways that feel in line with our values and integrity.
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Sexuality has a long, beautiful history of being a sacred energetic practice. If you are interested in exploring this aspect of your sexual self and spiritual connection, therapy can aide as a nonjudgmental, affirming space to do so, while providing practices and frameworks to grow in your journey.
I am a deeply committed to being an integrative and holistic therapist working both “top down and bottom up” - processing thoughts and narratives while bridging them to our embodied experience of emotion and sensation - and vice versa. Each session is tailored to meet each client’s unique needs. With a focus on somatic therapy, parts work (IFS), and attachment-based models (such as EFT), I also employ systemic, psychodynamic, yoga and mindfulness, relational models, and narrative therapy in my sessions.
Working systemically, I take into account the internalized legacies, histories, traumas, and societal pressures each person or partner may carry. Working from embodiment, I take into consideration the body’s ability to affirm or block our capacity for joy, pleasure, potential, and individual &/or relational connection. My humanistic and spiritual background affirms the lived truth and wisdom of the Self and our therapy will work to creveal that truth and wisdom, integrating it into your life and relationships in creative and expansive ways.
In couples therapy, I work through an attachment-based lens, helping partners excavate the needs found underneath their conflicts. By identifying and shifting unhelpful patterns that are keeping a couple stuck, we reimagine new, life-giving ways of doing relationship and build skills that create a more fulfilling heart-centered connection and intimacy.
how I work.
therapy and coaching
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I offer therapy in a warm and inviting office in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, as well as virtually, so you can access affirming care wherever you feel most at ease. My office in Philadelphia provides a beautiful view of the city skyline along with a comfortable waiting area with free wifi, coffee, and tea.
Coaching services are available worldwide virtually via Zoom.
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One-on-one therapy wherein we collaborate to identify and pursue your goals and creatively explore the roadblocks getting in the way of those goals. This often means exploring the many parts of who you are and diving into how these parts show up in our life and relationships. Through this exploration you will get to know yourself deeply, gain clarity, and grow in ways that feel authentic and empowering in both your life and your relationships.
My current rate is $135 per 50 minute session.
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In couples/dyad therapy, I work through an attachment-based lens, helping partners excavate the needs and desires found underneath their conflicts. By tuning into emotion, identifying and shifting unhelpful patterns that are keeping a couple stuck, we reimagine new, life-giving ways of doing relationship. And, we build skills that create fulfilling heart-centered connection. Additionally, I support couples in enhancing emotional and sexual intimacy and becoming more present, secure and connected to both themselves and towards each other.
My current rate is $135 per 50 minute session.
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I have limited sliding scale therapy available for those in need. Please reach out if interested.
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My coaching practice is a great fit for clients looking to work in creative and actionable ways. Similar to my therapy practice, my coaching work is integrative, holistic, and tailored to meet each individual or couple. I borrow from my education and expertise as a mental health therapist, certified relationship coach, certified life coach, yoga teacher, mentor, bodyworker, and Ayurvedic health counselor. This option is also perfect for clients looking for support who are not Pennsylvania residents. Currently working with clients from all corners of the United States and beyond, this service is offered worldwide, virtually via Zoom.
meet Daniel Cordua, MFT
I received my Master in Couple and Family Therapy with a specialization in Sex Therapy from Thomas Jefferson University. Upon graduation, I received the Dr. Kenneth Coleman Clinical Excellence Award, the Director’s Award, and the Certificate of Highest Distinction. I have also been a leader in the healing and wellness world for over 16 years as a relationship and life coach, 500 hr certified yoga teacher, yoga studio owner, yoga and meditation educator, and licensed massage therapist. My private practice is based in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Institute of Individual, Relational, and Sex Therapy (PhIIRST). My coaching work is available worldwide.
Heart-centered, I bring my own personality to sessions and offer a down-to-earth relatability, warmth, care, support, challenge, and humor. Working with clients of diverse ages and backgrounds, I consider myself countercultural, spiritual, and I am LGBTQIA+ affirming, sex-positive, and kink-friendly. I am committed to an inclusive practice that affirms all identities and is based in self compassion, social justice, cultural competence, cultural humility, and anti-racism.
I have a large variety of professional trainings and experiences that are integrated into my therapy sessions when beneficial to my clients, including:
Certified Relationship Coach, The Relationship School
Certified Ayurvedic Health Counselor, California College of Ayurveda
500 hr Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga Teacher & Educator
Licensed Massage Therapist
My additional training includes, but is not limited to:
Somatic Trauma Healing Certification
Comprehensive Internal Family Systems Therapy Course
Complex Trauma Certification Training
Religious Trauma, Spiritual Abuse & Cult Recovery Training
Clinical Applications of Polyvagal Theory in Trauma Treatment
Couples Institute, Developmental Model Training
Gottman Methods Couple Therapy Levels 1 & 2
Robbins-Madanes Institute Core 100 Coaching Training
Outside of my clinical work, I facilitate men’s circles, host workshops, teach yoga, lead yoga teacher trainings, and still work (on a limited basis) as a massage therapist + bodyworker. In my free time I love being in nature, practicing yoga and meditation, reading, adventuring in the city, traveling to new places around the world and of the mind, and spending moments with friends & family and sweet sweet quality time connecting with my partner. I am also an Italian-American and food is my love language!
let’s get started.
Thank you so much for being here and your interest! I look forward to reading your message and will reach out within two business days to schedule your free 20-minute initial consultation.
For in-person sessions, my office is located in the beautiful Rittenhouse Square. 255 S. 17th St Suite 2200, Philadelphia, PA 19103