Specialties | Kwan Psychotherapy

Anxiety & OCD

Anxiety can look like persistent worry, perfectionism, intrusive thoughts, a need for certainty, or a mind that simply won’t let something go. Sometimes it keeps you moving—planning, checking, anticipating, trying to stay one step ahead—and sometimes it leaves you feeling stuck. We’ll get curious about what your anxiety is trying to protect you from, often using Internal Family Systems (IFS) to understand the parts of you that worry, anticipate, and work so hard to keep you safe. Together, we’ll build more capacity to tolerate uncertainty and respond with choice rather than fear. When OCD is part of the picture, I may also incorporate Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)

Identity

There are times when the question isn’t what’s wrong, but who am I now? We’re shaped by family, culture, gender, relationships, expectations, and the roles we learn to inhabit—often long before we have much say in them. Therapy can offer room to examine what you’ve inherited, what you’ve adapted to, what still fits, and what you may be ready to leave behind. Drawing on psychodynamic and narrative approaches, we’ll explore how your history continues to shape the present while distinguishing the stories that have been written about or for you from the ones you want to author yourself.

Relationships + Family Dynamics

The ways we attach, accommodate, withdraw, protect ourselves, and reach for connection often have histories much older than the relationship in front of us. You may find yourself repeating familiar roles, struggling to set boundaries, or understanding a pattern intellectually while still feeling unable to change it. Together, we can look at what happens between you and the people you love—and what happens inside you in response. An attachment-based approach helps us understand these patterns as adaptations formed in relationship, which means they can also shift through relationship.

Complex Trauma

Trauma isn’t always a single identifiable event. Sometimes it develops through years of adapting—to instability, emotional neglect, criticism, unpredictability, or environments where parts of you needed to become smaller, quieter, vigilant, pleasing, or exceptionally capable. Those adaptations can persist long after they’re needed, showing up in your body, relationships, self-concept, or sense of safety. Alongside making sense of your history, I draw on EMDR and somatic approaches to work with how experience is held in both mind and body, gradually building greater safety, flexibility, and choice.

Fertility + Family Building

Trying to build a family can bring you into intimate contact with uncertainty, waiting, grief, hope, medical systems, and the limits of control. Your life can begin to organize itself around appointments, cycles, decisions, and outcomes while the rest of the world seems to move forward normally. Whether you’re navigating fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, donor conception, or a path to family different from the one you imagined, there is room here for all of its complexity. I incorporate mindfulness-based approaches to help you remain connected to yourself while moving through circumstances you cannot simply think your way through.

Perinatal + Matrescence

Pregnancy, birth, and postpartum can transform far more than your body. Identity, relationships, sexuality, work, family roles, and your understanding of yourself can all shift at once—alongside enormous cultural pressure about how becoming a mother is supposed to feel. Matrescence gives us a framework for understanding motherhood as a developmental transition in its own right, rather than something you should simply adjust to. I use an attachment-informed approach to explore both the relationship taking shape with your child and what becoming a parent may awaken from your own history.

My approach also draws from Chinese traditions that understand the perinatal period as a time of profound transition requiring care, rest, nourishment, and replenishment—not a race to return to who you were before. Alongside attachment-informed therapy, I may incorporate Chinese food therapy and herbal traditions as we attend to both the psychological and embodied experience of becoming a mother.

Parenthood

Parenthood can hold extraordinary love alongside worry, guilt, anger, ambivalence, responsibility, and the relentless question of whether you’re getting it right. Raising another person also has a remarkable way of bringing us face-to-face with ourselves: our childhoods, our expectations, our limits, and the parts of us we thought we had long since figured out. Therapy can create room for the person who exists alongside the parent. I often draw on Internal Family Systems (IFS) to understand the different parts of you that emerge in parenting and create more space between what gets triggered and how you choose to respond.

Perimenopause + Menopause

Perimenopause and menopause can alter mood, sleep, cognition, sexuality, body, relationships, and the sense of self you’ve known for decades—often while you’re simultaneously caring for children, parents, careers, relationships, or all of the above. I see this period not simply as a collection of symptoms to manage, but as a significant psychological and bodily transition worthy of attention in its own right. A mind-body approach allows us to understand physiological and emotional experience as interconnected while making room for the questions about identity and change that can emerge at midlife. When useful, I may also draw from Chinese medicine traditions, including food therapy and herbalism, as another way of supporting the body through this transition.

Aging

Aging can bring us face to face with a different question: What do I want the second half of my life to look like? After years of being needed—by work, family, relationships, and the roles you’ve learned to carry—there can be an opening to reconsider what you want when your life is no longer organized entirely around everyone else. What might you reclaim, shed, begin, or choose differently?

In Chinese medicine, this period is sometimes called the Second Spring: not simply a story of decline, but a transition into another season of vitality, authority, and possibility. Alongside therapy, I may draw on Chinese medicine traditions, including food therapy and herbalism, to support the body through this transition while we make room for what you want to create next.