Start Healing with a Therapist Near You

When you’re looking for an LA or Pasadena therapist, the last thing you want is to wait days or weeks, only to hear the therapist isn’t available to see you. Many people give up and miss out on the help they need.

We know what that feels like, and have made it our goal to connect you with a therapist that can see you within a week of reaching out. That means we’ll get back to your request within a day. Additionally, if you need help choosing a therapist, we’ll pair you with a therapist you feel good about and that’s available to see you. Our counselors in Pasadena and Los Angeles can see you for in-person or online therapy.

So click below and schedule a call with us. Were here to help you make a lasting change in your mental health and relationships.

Our rates are consistent with other private practice therapists in Pasadena and Los Angeles. Pricing information is listed on each therapist’s profile page.

For information about fees, click here.

Therapy is an expensive investment of money, time, and emotional courage. It can feel daunting to take the first step. On the other side of this first step, when you’re with the right therapist who does great work with you, the payoff for your relationships, emotions, and aspirations is life changing. With the right Pasadena therapist, that change is possible.

Couples Therapy in Pasadena: EFT and Restoration Therapy

When looking for couples therapy, often partners are overwhelmed by the emotional tension or icy coldness in the relationship. At our Pasadena therapy center, the first step is to broaden the couple’s understanding of the core issue they’re facing. The next is more difficult: it involves coming closer to the emotions and learning to express them in a way that fosters greater trust and intimacy. This can be a difficult process, and requires a therapist who can guide a couple through vulnerable experiences with safety.

EFT

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy is a process that helps couples move from “secondary” to “primary” expressions of attachment emotions. When scared of rejection, partners will hide their vulnerable needs from each other in the form of criticism, anger, or distance. EFT therapists help couples practice openly expressing their emotion. Just like starting a warm fire, there’s a cascading effect when each partner expresses clearly and directly, promoting trust and secure attachment.

Restoration Therapy

Restoration therapy is a more structured process of couples therapy, or marriage counseling, that moves couples from their “pain cycle” to a “peace cycle”. The therapy starts with building a shared understanding of the couple’s pain cycle to broaden awareness. No problem can be solved before it is first understood. Next, the couple learns to differentiate – meaning they learn to self-reflect and express their emotional state – before they get into a heated argument.
This process helps a couple build shared meaning, and deepens their understanding of each other, their pain, and how to connect meaningfully for the betterment of their relationship.

Trauma Therapy in Pasadena

Psychoanalytic Therapy

Many of our Pasadena therapists are highly trained in a psychoanalytic approach to therapy. Many people, when they think of psychoanalysis, think of a cigar-smoking, cold Freudian character. This isn’t us.
A contemporary approach to psychoanalytic work understands that the mind is fundamentally formed by our earliest experiences. The mind is “plastic” early in life, meaning it’s like a soft ball of clay that forms itself around its experience. Much of how you experience your emotions, how you get angry, how you withdraw, what friendships you like, what romantic relationships you form, how capable you feel, and how hopeful you experience the world are formed early on.
Your earliest experiences taught you who you are and how the world works.
So why do we need to talk about it? Because your mind still has a “plastic” (moldable) mode. It enters into that mode when you sense, with safety, that another person is sharing (understanding and feeling) your experience from your perspective. In this mode, your mind is able to process, regulate, and understand the emotional experience that’s taking up space in your mind.
So what does this have to do with trauma?
When we have trauma early on, the brain creates a template of the experience, as if it’s saying “This will happen again, so always watch out for this!” This fear response is protective, but has an unwelcome side effect: our mind uses this template to color all our future interactions and relationships. As a result, trauma that happened years – decades – ago will still inform our feelings, our sleep, our panic, and our difficulty maintaining close relationships.
Psychoanalytic therapy helps you explore and resolve this trauma response so you can live in the present. It’s deeply empowering to emerge from the process of therapy with self-awareness, hope, clarity, and empowerment.

Somatic Therapy in Pasadena

Somatic therapy is a process that treats trauma through the focus on our bodies. We do this because all of our emotional experience is expressed and understood through our bodies. Much like an ice burg, if we just talk *about* our problems (the tip of the ice burg), we miss the body’s salient signals that will point the patient toward the needed change.
Emotions are always bodily expressed. When you get anxious you might feel your gut tightening, or your heart beating fast. When you feel sad you’ll feel your energy lower and your posture will change. Our emotions are not simply “feelings” we experience “internally” – they are the body’s readiness for action, stored and experienced through our entire physiology.
When we pay attention to these signals, opportunities emerge to create healing and change. This looks different for every client. Often somatic therapy is a combination of growing in understanding of the signals the patient’s body is presenting, and using somatic exercises with the therapist to teach the body to expand, to understand, and to soothe the client’s emotional state. Learn more here