Services
About My Clients
My clients are often adults moving through a big life transition, grief, or a shift in identity — sometimes tied to immigration, culture, or family dynamics. Many are high-functioning but feel stuck, overwhelmed, or disconnected from themselves. Some are bicultural or Mandarin-speaking and want a therapist who understands that experience firsthand. Most don't have any art background — they're simply looking for a space that feels honest, curious, and unhurried.
My Background and Approach
I'm a bilingual (English/Mandarin) psychotherapist and art therapist at Transcendent Self Therapy in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Before training as a therapist, I studied architecture, which shapes how I think about space, structure, and how we build our inner and outer worlds. My clinical training includes palliative care and community settings, supporting people facing existential concerns, end-of-life experiences, medical trauma, and chronic illness. My approach is humanistic and person-centered — I believe every individual holds the potential to find their own answers. My work is holistic and attachment theory-informed, with psychodynamic sensibilities. I incorporate dream work and curiosity, attending closely to the nervous system and the here-and-now. Creativity runs through my work, though no art experience is needed — creativity is already present in everything in life. My cross-cultural background shapes my sensitivity to how culture and family shape a person's story.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
I believe every person already holds the potential to find their own answers — my role is to help create the conditions where that becomes possible, not to hand someone a fixed solution. I don't see crisis as collapse. I think of it as a developmental event — a sign that something in a person's life is ready to be reorganized, not proof that something has gone wrong. Being stuck isn't a diagnosis; it's often just where growth is happening slowly, out of view. To me, the only real failure is self-abandonment — losing touch with your own needs, instincts, or truth in order to be acceptable to someone else. I think of life as an ongoing process of separation and individuation, one that doesn't end after childhood but keeps happening, again and again, at every transition. Healing rarely follows a straight line, and I don't think it needs to. Presence matters more than protocol.