A therapist in Palo Alto,
ten minutes away
One Caltrain stop, or a flat ride down Middlefield.
Depth-oriented individual and couples therapy at 667 Lytton Avenue — close enough to Menlo Park that a weekly session survives a normal week.
Free 15-minute consultation · 667 Lytton Ave, Suite #9
Weekly therapy lives or dies on the commute
This sounds like a trivial consideration and it is not. Open-ended therapy asks you to show up at the same time every week for a long stretch, including the weeks when you do not feel like it, and especially those weeks. Anything that makes turning up harder eventually wins.
A forty-minute drive each way is ninety minutes out of an evening. That is survivable in month one and quietly fatal by month seven — not because the work stopped being useful, but because the arithmetic stopped being sustainable. People rarely say “I stopped because of the traffic.” They say the timing got difficult.
Travel time depends on traffic, transit schedules and your starting point. Sessions are at 667 Lytton Ave, Suite #9, Palo Alto. Check your current route and posted parking restrictions before traveling. Online sessions are an option for clients located in California.
Lytton Avenue, downtown
The office is at 667 Lytton Avenue, Suite #9 — downtown Palo Alto, a couple of blocks off University.
By train. University Avenue station is about a ten-minute walk. If you are coming straight from a Menlo Park office this is usually the least stressful option, because it removes the parking question entirely.
Travel time depends on traffic, transit schedules and your starting point. Sessions are at 667 Lytton Ave, Suite #9, Palo Alto. Check your current route and posted parking restrictions before traveling. Online sessions are an option for clients located in California.
By bike. A few flat miles. Several people who come from Menlo Park do this year-round and treat the ride as part of the hour.
Not a different set of problems, but a particular pressure
Menlo Park and the streets around it hold an unusual concentration of people whose professional lives are going extremely well and whose internal lives are not, and who have nowhere to say so. Venture and finance, biotech, senior engineering and legal roles, and a great many households where both adults are carrying that at once.
The specific difficulty is that nothing is wrong in any way that would justify the fuss. There is no crisis to point at. The job is good, the compensation is good, the family looks right from the outside, and there is a flatness underneath it that has no obvious cause and no obvious permission to be discussed.
That is a real thing and it responds well to being taken seriously. It responds poorly to being managed, optimised, or waited out, which are usually the three strategies already tried.
Slower, and in the present tense
I practise gestalt and depth-oriented therapy. Less analysing your life from a distance, more attention to what happens in you while you talk about it — where the breath stops, what you move away from, what your voice does on a particular name.
Sessions are fifty minutes, usually weekly, open-ended. No worksheets, no homework, no promise that a fixed number of sessions will resolve something that took twenty years to build.
If what you need is short and bounded — a decision that has to be made, a specific fear, a bad quarter — that is a legitimate and effective piece of work, and I will tell you if I think it is what you actually want.
Before you reach out
Travel time depends on traffic, transit schedules and your starting point. Sessions are at 667 Lytton Ave, Suite #9, Palo Alto. Check your current route and posted parking restrictions before traveling. Online sessions are an option for clients located in California.
Ask about current morning, daytime or evening appointments. Availability changes; online sessions may also be an option for clients located in California.
Downtown Palo Alto has time-limited street parking and several public garages a short walk from Lytton. Most people who drive regularly settle into a garage rather than circling for a space, which is what the street parking will otherwise cost you in stress before a session.
We can, anywhere in California, and some people work entirely that way. But for a distance this short I would encourage you to try in person first. The room does something that the screen does not, and it is easier to notice that difference than to argue about it.
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.
Not at all. A good number of people come from an office rather than from home, and a fair number specifically prefer a therapist who is not in the town they live in.
Yes. Bear in mind that most insurance does not cover couples work, for reasons worth understanding rather than being surprised by.
A free fifteen-minute conversation, by phone or video. No intake form, no history to prepare. Mostly it is a chance to hear how someone sounds before committing an hour to them.