Online Therapy for Adults and Couples in California
Shai Larsen Therapy offers online therapy for adults and couples across California. Sessions are held over secure video, so you can get support from home or anywhere in the state. Many clients come in dealing with anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, or a relationship pattern that keeps repeating. Others come because life feels stuck, even when nothing is clearly wrong. As a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, Shai works with individuals and couples who want real change, not just coping skills. If you want a therapist in California who works online, this is a good place to start.
Shai Larsen Therapy
Online therapy for adults and couples across California.
"If you’ve found your way here, perhaps some part of you is longing for more. More freedom. More connection. More meaning. More aliveness. Or simply a deeper relationship with yourself, the ones you love, and the life that is uniquely yours to live. Wherever you are, I would be honored to meet you there." ~ Shai
Let's Live Alive.
It's What We Can Do.
I'm so glad you're here.
Being human can be beautiful, complicated, joyful, mundane, and painful, often all at once. There is so much more to us than our symptoms, our wounds, or the ways we have learned to survive. I believe that even when we feel lost or disconnected from ourselves, something within us still longs for meaning, connection, growth, and aliveness.
I have always been drawn to the questions that do not have easy answers: What happens when the life we have built no longer feels like the life we want to be living? What do we hold onto because it is right for us, and what do we hold onto because we are afraid to let go? How do we remain open to love, loss, uncertainty, and change without losing ourselves in the process? And what becomes possible when we begin listening more closely to the life within us that is asking to be lived?
My path to becoming a therapist has taken me through very different worlds. I hold a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University Los Angeles and a Master’s degree in Environmental Policy from Columbia University. Before becoming a therapist, I worked as an analyst with the Environmental Protection Agency, spent more than a decade supporting technology executives and boards in the Bay Area, taught English to Tibetan monks in India, and volunteered in hospice care with the Zen Hospice Project and Threshold Choir.
Travel has also been an important part of my life, allowing me to encounter different cultures, spiritual traditions, landscapes, and ways of understanding what gives life meaning. Moving between boardrooms, monasteries, hospice bedsides, and communities around the world has shaped the way I see people. While our lives may look very different, we are remarkably alike in our longing to be known, to belong, to make sense of what we have lived through, and to live in a way that feels true.
Those experiences have taught me to look beyond the problem and toward the whole person. I want to understand not only what hurts, but what has shaped you, what has sustained you, what matters to you, and what in you may be asking for something different now.
My approach is warm, relational, active, depth-oriented, and trauma-informed. I draw from attachment theory, Emotionally Focused Therapy, psychodynamic therapy, parts work, somatic awareness, mindfulness, ACT, and strengths-based approaches. My work is also shaped by questions of meaning, freedom, responsibility, loss, and what we choose to do with the life we have.
Therapy, to me, is about more than feeling less anxious, overwhelmed, or stuck. It is about becoming more fully yourself, more able to trust what you know, honor what you need, be honest about what you want, and live with greater freedom, connection, meaning, and aliveness.
A different way forward
You can understand a pattern perfectly and still repeat it the moment you are hurt, frightened, overwhelmed, or longing to be loved. Insight matters, but sometimes change requires more than understanding. It requires a different experience.
The relationship we build can become a place where something new actually happens. You can practice being honest, letting yourself be known, asking for what you need, setting boundaries, tolerating difference, and discovering that an old pattern does not always have to determine what comes next. The past remains part of your story. It does not have to decide the rest of it.
The space between us
Our work together is warm, active, collaborative, and deeply human. There is no pressure to have the right answers or to arrive as anyone other than who you are. I listen closely, ask questions, notice patterns, offer perspective, and challenge you when I see something worth looking at. We may slow down an emotion, notice what is happening in your body, become curious about a protective part of you, explore an old wound, or pay attention to something unfolding between us in the moment.
Some sessions may feel quiet and reflective. Others may be emotional, challenging, surprising, or filled with laughter. I often draw upon nature, music, creativity, humor, and whatever else helps the work feel alive and human. You can be accepted without being left exactly where you are. Supported and challenged. Known without having to perform.
Listening for what is true
Many of us become so focused on managing life that we lose touch with what we are feeling, needing, or carrying. We learn to push through, stay busy, stay strong, care for others, or simply get by. Over time, our own voice can become harder to hear. Therapy gives us a place to slow things down and become curious about what hurts, what needs care, and what your emotions, symptoms, and patterns may be trying to protect or communicate.
Being human will always involve grief, fear, uncertainty, and pain. The work is not to eliminate those experiences, but to understand yourself more deeply and create greater freedom in how you meet them. Over time, the question becomes less “What is the right thing to do?” and more “What is true for me now?”
Therapy as a path back to yourself. A space to understand what has shaped you and choose what comes next.
Online Therapy for Adults
Many of the adults I work with are thoughtful, capable, and remarkably good at carrying on. They may also be exhausted.
You may find yourself overthinking, staying too long, saying yes when something in you means no, questioning your worth, caring for everyone but yourself, numbing what feels difficult, or waiting for certainty before allowing yourself to move.
Anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, addiction, relationship difficulties, or a major life transition may have made it harder to hear yourself clearly. Or perhaps nothing is obviously wrong, but some part of your life no longer feels fully yours.
Our online therapy work can help you understand the patterns that have shaped you, tend to what hurts, and build a stronger relationship with your own instincts, needs, desires, and voice.
The hope is to have more freedom to choose how you want to live.
Online Couples Therapy
Most couples who come to therapy still care deeply about one another. The problem is that, when it matters most, they can no longer seem to reach each other.
The same fight returns in different forms. One reaches harder while the other retreats. Hurt becomes criticism. Overwhelm becomes distance. Both people begin protecting themselves, and the protection itself becomes part of what keeps them apart.
Together, we slow the cycle down enough to see what is actually happening: the fear beneath the anger, the longing beneath the protest, the vulnerability beneath the withdrawal, and the ways each partner contributes to what happens next.
Compassion matters here, and so does responsibility.
We also strengthen what helps love endure: friendship, affection, honesty, repair, curiosity, respect, play, and the ability to turn toward one another when it would be easier to turn away.
As an online couples therapist serving all of California, my work draws from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Relational Life Therapy (RLT). The goal is not perfect harmony. It is a relationship where both people can be more fully themselves, repair when they hurt each other, and find their way back to one another with greater trust, intimacy, and resilience.