ShieldMee Inc. · 501(c)(3) Nonprofit
About the founder of Shieldmee
A note from Eduardo Florez, LMHC — Founder & Clinical Director
I’ve been on both sides of this.
I’m the clinician who’ll be sitting across from you. I’m also, years ago, the person who needed help and wasn’t sure he’d make it. I’ve been in recovery for eighteen years — and the same mental health system that saved my life is the one that underpays and burns out the people who do the saving. I’ve seen it from the inside as a patient and from the inside as a provider, and I built ShieldMee out of what I learned standing in both places.
Why I built Shieldmee.
Most practices quietly refer out the clients who are too complex, too resistant, or too high-risk — the addiction, the trauma that hasn’t responded to anything, the court-ordered, the families in crisis, the personality patterns nobody’s trained for. Those are the people I built this for. Not because they’re easy. Because somebody has to, and because I know what it’s like to be the person a system is willing to give up on.
I also built it for the clinicians. Every year, thousands of good people enter this field motivated and prepared, and the system pays them poverty wages, hands them forty clients at a time, and burns them out within five years. You can’t deliver excellent care through a workforce that’s underpaid and unsupported. So ShieldMee trains clinicians properly and pays them what the work is worth — because the quality of care you receive depends entirely on the condition of the person sitting across from you.
Where I come from.
For close to two decades I’ve worked in the settings most clinicians never set foot in — state psychiatric hospitals, including Oregon State Hospital; correctional facilities; community mental health; court and child-welfare work; forensic evaluation. That’s where I learned to work with the people others find “too much”: the resistant, the dangerous-on-paper, the ones who’ve learned that nobody stays.
I trained at Florida International University and did my graduate work at Pacific University in Oregon, with a focus on Latinx psychology. I’m Colombian-American and bilingual, and I work in both English and Spanish — not as a checkbox, but because this work is genuinely different in your own language. For about five years I’ve worked under the mentorship and supervision of Dr. William Samek, a forensic psychologist with more than forty years in the field, and the steadiest professional relationship I have.
How I work.
I’m not going to nod at you for fifty minutes and send you home unchanged. A few things I actually believe:
- The contradictions are where the truth lives. The parts of you that
don’t seem to fit together usually reveal the most about how you really operate. - Your resistance is information, not an obstacle. When you push back, you’re showing me exactly where the real work is.
- I’d rather tell you something true than something comfortable. Comfortable is what most people have already had. It didn’t change anything.
I don’t sell a single method. I start inside your logic instead of arguing with it from the outside, find the pattern underneath the problem you came in with, and work to disrupt it where it actually lives.
The bigger project
ShieldMee is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and that’s deliberate. The for-profit model rewards volume over depth and turns clinicians into contractors and clients into billing units. I built this so the mission can’t be sold off.
Part of what we’re building is larger than any one practice — a model that trains clinicians to serve the hardest cases and the clinical tools to back it up. But none of that matters to you in a session. What matters to you is that the person across from you is prepared, present, and not going anywhere.
If you're looking for a fit
If you want someone to agree with you, I’m not your guy. If you’re ready to look at what’s actually happening — in your life, your relationships, yourself — this is what I do, on purpose. I’m glad you’re here.