Therapy for Third Culture Kids

If you’re Asian, BIPOC, multiracial, or from an immigrant family and grew up navigating multiple cultures and expectations, it can feel like no one truly understands you — even when you adapt, code-switch, and read the room perfectly. The familiar question, “Where are you from?” can feel exhausting to answer.

A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is someone whose identity was shaped by growing up across two or more cultures — through migration, transnational family life, or a multicultural household. For BIPOC TCKs, this experience is often intertwined with racism, colonial histories, political violence, systemic oppression, and intergenerational grief or loss. As a fellow TCK, I bring both lived and professional experience to therapy for clients navigating cross-cultural identity and belonging.

TCKs can experience:

• Feeling like you belong everywhere and nowhere

• Feeling misunderstood by friends and family

• Grief for places, communities, relationships, or selves left behind

• Tension between family expectations and your own desires

Therapy for TCK emphasizes:

• Making space for your multiple selves that span cultures and identities

• Clarifying what belonging feels like to you

• Identifying survival and relational patterns that no longer serve you

• Exploring untold intergenerational histories and cultural context

• Recentering cultural and ancestral wisdom marginalized through systemic oppression

• Strengthening relationships and connections to collectives and communities

I offer therapy to Third Culture Kids in-person Downtown San Francisco or Pacific Heights, and via telehealth to clients in East Bay, South Bay, Los Angeles, and across California. My approach is liberation-oriented, emphasizing the social and historical context of individual struggles and culturally-responsive, especially to Asian, Asian-American, and BIPOC experiences.

I invite to schedule a free consult to explore how we might work together and answer any questions you may have. I look forward to connecting with you.