Creative & Culturally Responsive Therapy
in-person & virtual therapy for individuals adult therapy ✦ child therapy ✦ teen therapy
Hello & Welcome!
Thank you for being here. My name is Ella (she/her). I am offer individual therapy for adults, teens and children. I provide creative and culturally responsive offerings using client-centered, strengths-based therapy. I take a collaborative approach, joining with clients to provide support and care around the issues that are present for them. Each client’s unique strengths and needs shape what our work together looks like.
My style is gentle, intuitive, and compassionate. Often times, we relate to our symptoms as something to fix. I believe a stance of compassion helps us honor the symptom’s function and move us towards acceptance, curiosity and building a kinder relationship to ourselves. I believe creativity is an inexhaustible resource, and I like bringing the expressive arts into therapy, sometimes as a practice we do together, or as a resource to extend and deepen your process outside of sessions.
I find my style is well suited to support clients with:
anxiety
codependent tendencies
childhood trauma and sexual abuse
identity exploration
strong inner critics, perfectionism
burnout and sustainability
building connection to authentic self
Focus | Specialty
I especially enjoy working with people who identify as:
BIPOC and/or mixed-race
Queer and/or of marginalized genders
Highly sensitive, introverts, deep feelers
Creatives and artists
Approach
I seek to build respectful and strong connections with clients as a foundation for safety and trust. I hold a social justice framework and consider how systems and socio-cultural identities impact my client’s experiences and our therapeutic relationship. I often integrate mindfulness and expressive arts approaches, including body-based, somatic modalities. I find ways to gently and accessibly invite clients across all experience and comfort levels to engage with creativity, if they desire.
Therapy for youth
I offer a space for youth of all ages to build connection with themselves. Young people are so often being directed and required to perform. I believe having a space where they get to exercise their agency and voice their opinions and preferences is a therapeutic experience. I honor and embrace the wisdom that comes from attunement with oneself, and having healthy outlets to express feelings. I have experience supporting youth with anxiety, self-esteem, divorce transitions, family dynamics, developmental transitions, and perfectionism.
I love working with teens, and can offer a blend of talk therapy, creative options, and experiential approaches so they can have a place to talk about what matters to them. When working with children, I offer child-centered play therapy and expressive arts during in-person visits. These modalities compliment children’s natural language of play and creativity, and allow them to work through their feelings in a comfortable and safe way. I offer collateral sessions with parents to gain context and build an alliance to support the child.
About Ella
I am a registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist. I identify as a queer, mixed race, cis-gender woman, with Filipino and European heritage. I received my masters in counseling psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where I concentrated in expressive arts therapy. I am an artist with a focus on visual arts, and I draw on creativity and imagination as a resource. As a highly sensitive introvert, I engage with things deeply and appreciate the richness of internal experiences. I believe that my work as a therapist is one of the ways I can best offer my strengths as a tool for social change, and my hope is that I can support others to feel empowered in their own healing and liberation.
Offerings
I have a hybrid practice offering in-person therapy and Zoom sessions through my Berkeley office. All clients must be currently living in California.
For 50-minute sessions, my full fee is $170 - $200 (determined by resources). I have limited sliding scale options available to those who qualify based on income and resources. Currently, my sliding scale spots are full.
I do not currently take insurance, but can provide superbills (a monthly statement that can be submitted to your insurance provider). If you are seeking reimbursement from you insurance, please contact them directly to see if they cover out-of-network providers who are Associate MFTs.