Hello! I am a licensed Psychologist with over 15 years of experience as a healing arts practitioner. I earned a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California Institute of Integrated Studies. My Bachelor of Science degree in Psychobiology, with a double major in French, is from the University of California, Los Angeles. I have worked in a variety of settings, both as a researcher and a psychotherapist, including private and group practice, addiction programs, senior living facility/hospice, and an early psychosis treatment program, helping people from a broad range of cultural, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. I have also studied and practiced somatic approaches to health and well-being, including body-oriented psychotherapy, dance/movement therapy, and yoga and other movement arts. I am interested in the role of the body and movement in emotional, cognitive, and spiritual processing. In my private practice, I enjoy working with adults of all ages, be they seeking to balance relationships/family, career, and personal needs, or aiming to develop a more grounded sense of self, meaning, and direction. I work with women in all stages of life: those individuating, questioning cultural/familial norms, and discovering their gifts, those navigating motherhood, caring for elderly parents, as well as elder women. I work with bicultural people, particularly immigrants, whose stories are often erased and untold. Finally, I offer many years of training in psychedelic therapy; I can support preparation and integration processes.

What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?

Our first session is an opportunity for me to listen, to begin the process of understanding you and what it is that you want for yourself. In some cases, this can be a difficult question to answer. I will help you articulate what you want from an embodied place, which will become the intention of our work together.

What treatment methods and tools do you utilize?

My clients have told me they appreciate my warmly inquisitive and empathically confrontational approach. My approach to psychotherapy is grounded in psychodynamic theory and weaves multiple therapeutic modalities and research, including trauma-informed interventions, somatic therapy, attachment theory, transpersonal psychology, and mindfulness-based therapy. I attend to the cultural, psychological, socioeconomic, somatic, biological, and spiritual perspectives and dimensions of one’s experience.

Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.

In addition to what I have shared, I bring both personal experience and training in working with bicultural people, immigrants and adult children of immigrants, who face challenges in receiving culturally responsive therapy that can adequately address the strengths, resiliencies, challenges & traumas that can arise within the immigration and cross-cultural experience. Also, as a parent, I deeply appreciate our hard work and the unknown terrain along which we all need support. We’ll make space for the joys, fears, and downright maddening moments that you wish to meet with care. I welcome and honor single moms, in particular. My own experience & education along this path, including the Hand in Hand Parenting Professionals Intensive, and my understanding of childhood development, guide my work.

About Tara Samiy, Psy.D.