Jia Rebecca Li, LMFT

Welcome. I work with both individuals and couples/families. My work focuses on the following three areas of personal and relational distress. Depression, anxiety and relationship challenges are common in all these areas. (1) COUPLE RELATIONSHIP: I work with couples to address infidelity, high conflict communication, intimacy issues, parenting conflict, significant adjustments (e.g., becoming parents, retirement, and career change), grief and loss (e.g., fertility challenges; miscarriage; illness; death in the family), extended family relationship, mixed race couples, blended families, etc. Our work together will focus on relationship dynamics front and center while supporting each partner in developing skills in multiple domains including self-regulation, attunement and co-regulation, effective and non-violent communications, problem-solving, self-care, and interpersonal effectiveness. These multiple challenges are often unfamiliar to therapists without specialized training in working with couples. My work with couples reflects my years of experiences and extensive training with - The Gottman Institute (Level III trained) - Hakomi Experiential Couples Psychotherapy -Certified Hakomi Therapist (CHT) - Terry Real's Real Life Therapy (Level I certified, plus multiple workshops and a monthly consultation group for multiple years) - The Couples Institute's Developmental Model of Couples Therapy - Intimacy, sexuality and consensual relationships with Dr. Marty Klein, Martha Kauppi and others. I'm also familiar with and incorporate in my work elements from EFT, IFS, DBT and Marshall Rosenberg's non-violent communication. I continue to prioritize professional development in this area, including frequent workshops with leading couple therapists and an ongoing consultation group with Terry Real. (2) LIFE TRANSITIONS: Transition is our inner process to cope with external changes. I work with phase-of-life transitions including emerging adulthood, new family formation, becoming parents, retirement, and career transition. In addition, I work with individuals on their significant relationship changes. Transition starts with an ending, develops through an often long “in-betweens” before the start of a new beginning. A challenging transition often involves grief and loss about the ending as well as anxiety and ambivalence about the adjustment and future. (2) GRIEF AND LOSS: I work primarily with traumatic and complex grief and anticipatory grief, both in individual therapy and with families. My clinical work with grief started at Kara, a Palo Alto based grief agency, where for three years I worked extensively with spouse loss, child loss, suicide loss, sudden death, victims of crimes, and other traumatic grief clients. I also facilitated grief groups for spouse loss, suicide loss and teen grief. Outside of my private practice, I remain a member of Kara’s community outreach team and continue to facilitate debriefings for local companies, organizations and families to address difficult death/crisis situations, including, most recently, pandemic impact and hate crimes. Culture, Race and Ethnicity. My clients are a good representation of the cultural diversity in the SF Bay Area. Cultural issues challenge more than just immigrants (new or old), minorities, or mix-racial families but ALL of us regardless of our race or ethnicity. My experiences as an immigrant and world traveler, living and working in different cultures and places of the world, and developing and transitioning through multiple professional careers have cultivated my capacity for compassion, empathy and curiosity. I genuinely seek to understand each individual, couple and family from multiple lens including family history, socioeconomic background, education, race and ethnicity, culture, gender identity and assumptions, and phase of life. I offer psychotherapy in Mandarin if that’s your preferred language of care and self-expression.