Therapy worth the
twenty minutes
Up El Camino, or a few stops on Caltrain.
Depth-oriented therapy at 667 Lytton Avenue in downtown Palo Alto — for people in Mountain View who want something open-ended rather than a fixed number of sessions.
Free 15-minute consultation · 667 Lytton Ave, Suite #9
The commute decides whether week thirty happens
Open-ended therapy is a weekly commitment held over a long stretch, and it is decided far more often by logistics than by motivation. The weeks that matter most are usually the ones where you least want to go, and on those weeks every added obstacle counts double.
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.
Evening slots exist for exactly this reason.
When the job is fine and you are not
Mountain View is dense with people doing technically demanding work at large companies, and the pattern that arrives here is consistent enough to name.
Nothing is wrong. Performance is fine, sometimes excellent. Compensation is fine. And there is a flatness that has been there long enough to feel like a personality trait rather than a symptom — the Sunday evening tightening, the inability to feel a good result for more than an afternoon, the sense of watching your own life from a slight distance.
This is one of the most under-treated things I see, precisely because there is no crisis to point at and no obvious moment at which a reasonable person would seek help. It usually gets managed instead — optimised, scheduled around, waited out — for a number of years.
The other thing that arrives often is a reorganisation or a layoff, where the real difficulty is rarely the money. It is what happens to a sense of self that has been fused with a role, a badge and a team for several years. That takes longer to metabolise than the job search does, and almost nobody expects it to.
A different tool
Short, structured therapy is genuinely effective for a bounded problem. A decision that has to be made. A specific fear. A discrete bad stretch. If that is what you need, an EAP or a brief course of CBT may serve you better than I will, and I will say so rather than take the hour.
What I do is the other thing. Patterns that have been running since long before this job, that do not resolve because they were never a problem of information. You can already narrate them accurately, and that has changed nothing, which is itself the clue.
Sessions are fifty minutes, usually weekly, open-ended. We review the work together as it goes rather than against a number set in advance.
667 Lytton Avenue, Suite #9
Downtown Palo Alto, a couple of blocks off University Avenue.
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.
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.
Video sessions are available anywhere in California, which matters most when the week gets away from you.
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.
An EAP is a genuinely useful thing and it is built for a specific job — a small number of sessions, quickly available, for something bounded. It is a different tool from open-ended depth work. If what you want is the second kind, it is worth knowing that from the start rather than discovering it when the sessions run out.
Downtown Palo Alto has time-limited street parking and public garages a short walk from the office. If you are coming weekly by car, settle on a garage early rather than circling.
In-network with Aetna and Stanford’s Cardinal Care plan (administered by Wellfleet). If you are on something else, there is a page here explaining out-of-network reimbursement and what to ask your plan.
Yes, anywhere in California. Some people work entirely that way. For this distance I would still suggest trying the room first if you can.
No. Therapy notes are protected health information. They are not shared with your employer or with immigration authorities. The narrow legal exceptions apply to every licensed therapist in California and I will explain them fully in the first session.
A free fifteen-minute call. No form, no history to prepare.