Counseling for
College Students
in Palo Alto
Off campus, on your terms.
Therapy for students at Foothill, De Anza, Santa Clara, Menlo College and Stanford, and for students home on the peninsula between terms — with the privacy questions answered first.
Free 15-min · In-person Palo Alto or telehealth in California · 18 and over
Between eighteen and twenty-four a person finds out, often for the first time, who they are when nobody who raised them is watching. It is one of the more useful moments to have a therapist, and one of the harder moments to arrange one.
Doing fine, by every measure except the one that counts.
Some of this might be recognisable:
Grades were who you were for eighteen years. Now they are one thing among many, and you are not sure what the others are.
The friend group happened fast and you are inside it without being sure you chose it.
Home is complicated in a way you could not see until you left, and going back for the summer brings it all up.
Your family gave up a great deal for you to be here, and that makes it very hard to say you are struggling.
The campus counseling center was helpful and also had a session limit, a waitlist, or a counselor you did not click with.
Something flattened in second year and has not come back, and nobody has noticed because your work is still fine.
Patterns are still
forming.
Most of what brings adults to therapy in their thirties and forties was laid down between eighteen and twenty-four: the first serious relationships, the first real separation from family, the first time the story you were handed about yourself stopped fitting. In college these patterns are still soft. They can be looked at before they set.
That is the honest case for counseling at this stage — not that something is wrong with you, but that the questions are live in a way they will not be again for a while. What do I actually want, separate from what was wanted for me. Who am I with people who did not know me at twelve. What do I do with the parts of home I cannot bring here.
College counseling that works is less about coping with the semester and more about being met, by an adult who is not grading you and not related to you.
The work is depth-oriented and relational, which in practice means we pay attention to what happens in the room as well as what happened in the week. It is open-ended, and it is not a crisis service; if you are in crisis, the campus counseling center and 988 exist for that and are faster than I am.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
— C. G. JungNot a slogan. A description of the job in front of a twenty-year-old, and a reason it is worth having company for it.
I see students from Foothill and De Anza, Santa Clara University, Menlo College, commuters to San José State, Stanford undergraduates and graduate students who want a therapist with no connection to the university, and students at colleges elsewhere who are home on the peninsula for the summer. There is no affiliation with any of them, which is rather the point.
Who finds out.
This is the question students ask first and the one most therapy websites answer last, so here it is plainly. Once you are eighteen, what you say in therapy is confidential. Your parents cannot call and ask how it is going. I cannot tell them you are a client. The narrow legal exceptions — serious danger to yourself or someone else, abuse of a child or dependent adult — are the same for every therapist in California and I will explain them fully in the first session.
The place privacy actually leaks is insurance. If you are on a parent's plan and the parent is the policyholder, the insurer sends them an explanation of benefits. It does not contain what you said. It does contain the provider's name, the date, and the type of service, which is enough to know you saw a therapist. Three ways around that:
The things that don't fit
on the intake form
Anxiety that has a grade attached. Not exam nerves — the older kind, where being good at things was the only reliable way to be safe at home, and college is the first place that stops working. The anxiety page goes into this; the short version is that high achievers rarely think their way out of it.
Flatness that started in second year. The novelty wore off, the work is fine, and you are watching your own life from slightly outside it. This is common enough to have its own article: depression in college students, and the depression page for the fuller picture.
Family, at a distance. Immigrant families, families where you are the first to go, families where leaving was itself a kind of disloyalty. Distance makes some of this visible for the first time, and there is nowhere on campus to put it.
First relationships. The first serious one, the first ending, the first time you notice you are repeating something you swore you would not. Individual work on this is often more useful at twenty than couples work, because the pattern is yours before it is anyone else's.
Not knowing what you want. Which is not a failure of planning. Under enough expectation, wanting itself goes quiet, and finding it again is slower than choosing a major.
How to start,
between everything else.
Free 15-min consultation
Phone or video. Mostly about fit, schedule and the insurance question. Nothing to prepare, and it is fine not to know what to say.
First session
Fifty minutes. What is going on now, what you have tried, and the confidentiality conversation in full so there are no surprises.
Ongoing weekly work
In person downtown or by video. Sessions can move to video between terms, as long as you are physically in California.
College student counseling in Palo Alto,
and by video across California
The office is at A Good Place Therapy on Lytton Avenue in downtown Palo Alto, a short walk from the University Avenue Caltrain station — reachable from Foothill and De Anza by car in about fifteen minutes, from Santa Clara and San José State by Caltrain, and from Stanford on foot or by Marguerite. Sessions can move to secure video during breaks or when the week gets away from you, with one constraint: I am licensed in California, so you need to be in the state at the time of the session. If you go home to Oregon for the summer, we pause.
Yes. I accept Stanford Cardinal Care and Aetna. I also accept private pay and can provide a superbill for out-of-network reimbursement. Reimbursement and your out-of-pocket cost depend on your plan’s benefits.
Age. I see adults, which means eighteen and over. If you are seventeen and reading this, the campus counseling center or your college's health service is the right first call, and they will know who sees minors locally.
This is one of the areas I work with in individual therapy.
How individual therapy works →
I trained at CIIS and the Pacific Gestalt Institute and came to this work after two decades in demanding technical and creative environments. I am not affiliated with any college, which is what makes an off-campus therapist useful.
Full BiographyOther Areas of Focus
Before you reach out
Not from me. Once you are eighteen, therapy is confidential and I cannot confirm to anyone that you are a client, with the narrow legal exceptions every California therapist has. The place it can leak is insurance: if a parent is the policyholder, they receive an explanation of benefits showing a provider name and date. California lets you ask the insurer to send those to you instead, and paying privately avoids the paperwork entirely.
Yes. I accept Stanford Cardinal Care and Aetna. I also accept private pay and can provide a superbill for out-of-network reimbursement. Reimbursement and your out-of-pocket cost depend on your plan’s benefits.
If home is in California, we move to video and keep going. If home is out of state, we pause, because I am licensed in California and you need to be in the state during the session. That is a real limit and worth knowing before you start.
Campus centers are good, fast, and usually free, and they are built for short-term work with session limits. What I offer is open-ended, off campus, and separate from the institution — nobody at the college knows you come here. Many students use both: the center for something acute, and this for the longer questions.
No. I work with adults, eighteen and over. If you are younger, your college health service or the campus counseling center will know who sees minors locally and can make the referral.
Both pages are. This one is for any college student on the peninsula; the Stanford student page covers Cardinal Care, the Vaden-versus-community question, and graduate and postdoc concerns in more detail. I have no affiliation with Stanford or any other college.
College Student Counseling · Palo Alto
Nobody is grading
this.
A free 15-minute consultation. Nothing to prepare, and it is fine not to know what to say.
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