Reviewed by Kathryn Vercillo, MA Psychology | Last Updated: November 2025 You know the feeling. Your stomach drops when you receive bad news. Your shoulders creep toward your ears during a stressful meeting. Your chest tightens before a difficult conversation, even when you tell yourself there is nothing to worry about. These experiences reveal something profound: your body is not...
This guest post is offered by our associate therapist, Rachel Lefkowitz Parnes, MA, Associate MFT. Rachel’s journey to becoming a therapist is deeply relatable to many of our Bay Area clients, having spent nearly a decade successfully navigating the high stakes environment of the tech world at LinkedIn. Her lived experience of performance culture, combined with her deep clinical training in...
Reviewed by Kathryn Vercillo, MA Psychology | Last Updated: November 2025 You have probably downloaded at least one. Maybe several. The meditation app that promised to ease your anxiety. The mood tracker that was supposed to help you understand your patterns. The chatbot that offered cognitive behavioral therapy techniques at 2 AM when you could not sleep. These apps are...
The question, "What is it to be alive today?" is perhaps the most profound human inquiry. As we navigate the end of the year, this question often feels obscured by external demands. There is also a constant, low level hum of anxiety. Society frequently suggests that our meaning lies in our capacity to produce, achieve, and solve. If we...
Reviewed by Kathryn Vercillo, MA Psychology | Last Updated: November 2025 You've been dragging yourself through each day feeling like you're moving through thick mud. Your shoulders ache constantly. Getting out of bed requires monumental effort, even after a full night's sleep. You assumed you were just tired, stressed, or maybe coming down with something. It might not have occurred...
Center for Mindful Psychotherapy is a non profit collective of approximately 100 Associate Marriage and Family Therapists in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can learn more about each of them from perusing our Therapist Directory. In our Conversations with Clinicians series, we interview therapists in more depth. They share more about the work that they do, the clients that...
Reviewed by Kathryn Vercillo, MA Psychology | Last Updated: November 2025 You notice the pattern again. A relationship starts well, but as you grow closer, something shifts. Maybe you find reasons to create distance. Maybe you become anxious when your partner seems less available. Maybe the whole dynamic feels eerily familiar to relationships that didn't work out before. You tell...
Center for Mindful Psychotherapy is a non profit collective of approximately 100 Associate Marriage and Family Therapists in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can learn more about each of them from perusing our Therapist Directory. In our Conversations with Clinicians series, we interview therapists in more depth. They share more about the work that they do, the clients that...
What does it actually look like to practice therapy mindfully? How do therapists hold space for complex emotions while maintaining their own groundedness and capacity? This month, we're sharing an intimate glimpse into the daily practice of Madison Parikka, AMFT, one of our associate therapists at Center for Mindful Psychotherapy. Her video offers more than a "day in the life."...
You know you need help processing your trauma. Maybe it's PTSD from a difficult experience, anxiety that traces back to childhood wounds, or depression rooted in unresolved grief. You've started researching trauma therapy in the Bay Area, and you've discovered something both exciting and overwhelming: there are dozens of specialized approaches, from Brainspotting to EMDR to Somatic Experiencing to Internal...