Therapy for Young Adults & College Students
Therapy for emerging adults, college and graduate students, and young professionals.
The transition from adolescence to adulthood brings possibility, discovery, uncertainty, and change. Many young adults grapple with questions that feel both exciting and unsettling: How can I locate myself within and alongside my family? Which parts of my story were shaped by those who came before me? How do I choose a path that feels my own? What kind of relationships do I want to build?
This stage often holds a tension between loyalty and connection to the people and communities that shaped us and the emergence of a more independent self. Understanding what expectations, emotions, and ways of coping a young adult may be carrying can be an important part of launching into adulthood in a way that feels authentic and self-directed. Therapy can help you decide what to carry forward and what may be ready to change.
For Stanford and Palo Alto University students, graduate students, medical trainees, and young professionals in the Bay Area, therapy may also involve achievement, impostor feelings, and the cost of organizing a life around external measures of success.
Common Reasons Young Adults Seek Therapy
- Academic stress, burnout, perfectionism, and fear of failure
- Anxiety, panic, depression, low motivation, and loneliness
- Dating, friendship, family, and boundary difficulties
- Identity, self-esteem, gender, sexuality, and belonging
- ADHD, autism, OCD, and intrusive thoughts
- Career uncertainty, professional direction, and major transitions
- Independence, meaning, and life direction
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it normal to feel lost or uncertain during college or young adulthood?
Yes. Young adulthood often brings greater freedom alongside greater uncertainty. Decisions about education, work, relationships, identity, and the future can feel consequential at a time when you are still discovering who you are and what matters to you. Therapy can offer a place to explore these questions without needing to have the answers already figured out.
Can therapy help with academic pressure, perfectionism, or fear of failure?
Yes. Academic and professional pressure can become intertwined with self-worth, expectations from family or ourselves, and fears about disappointing others or falling behind. Therapy can help with the immediate experience of stress while also exploring what achievement has come to mean and why it may feel so difficult to tolerate uncertainty, mistakes, or limits.
How can therapy help me become more independent while staying connected to my parents?
Becoming more independent does not mean that our parents become less important. They can become important in a different way as we discover more fully who we are, what we value, and how we want to live.
Therapy can help us hold both: developing a stronger sense of ourselves while remaining connected to important relationships, and exploring the guilt, loyalty, conflict, or fear that sometimes accompanies this process.
Why am I seeing my childhood and my relationship with my parents differently as a young adult?
Young adulthood can bring a new perspective on childhood and family relationships. As we gain independence and encounter new relationships and experiences, we may begin to understand things that happened in our families differently, including trauma or patterns carried across generations.
This can bring anger, grief, or disappointment, but also greater understanding and acceptance. Therapy can help us make sense of these experiences and consider what we want to carry forward or change—sometimes creating new possibilities for closeness and repair.
Do you work with Stanford and Palo Alto University students?
Yes. I have experience working with college and graduate students and understand some of the particular pressures that can accompany academic life and professional training. I offer in-person psychotherapy at my Palo Alto office for students at Stanford University, Palo Alto University, and other nearby colleges and graduate programs, as well as telehealth for students located throughout California.