Emelia Haiken(She/Her/Hers)

Emelia Haiken is a licensed psychotherapist in private practice in San Francisco, California, who works with children, teenagers, and adults. Many of her clients seek support for long-standing challenges with anxiety, low self-esteem, or relationships that feel stuck or unfulfilling. Others come to therapy following childhood trauma, family rupture, or life transitions that feel overwhelming. Emelia is especially attuned to working with clients navigating identity, sexuality, parenting, and emotional regulation. She also has experience supporting survivors of sexual abuse and those exploring gender identity or sexual orientation.

Emelia’s approach to therapy is warm, respectful, and collaborative. She practices from a psychodynamic and relational lens, which means she helps clients explore how their past—particularly early relationships and unconscious experiences—continues to shape their present-day feelings, behaviors, and relationship patterns. She believes therapy can be a powerful space to understand the roots of emotional distress and begin making meaningful, lasting change. With teenagers and adults, her work often focuses on building emotional insight, navigating difficult relational dynamics, and cultivating a more grounded and compassionate sense of self.

With children, Emelia provides both play and talk therapy, tailoring her approach to meet each child’s developmental and emotional needs. She views play as a child’s natural language and uses it to help young clients process feelings and experiences that may be hard to articulate directly. When appropriate, she also offers parenting support to help caregivers better understand and respond to their child’s emotional world.

Emelia has completed advanced psychodynamic and psychoanalytic training through The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley, and previously trained at The Maple Counseling Center in Beverly Hills and Valley Community Clinic in Los Angeles. She has also completed certificate programs at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, further deepening her understanding of developmental and relational processes across the lifespan.

Emelia offers both in-person and remote therapy.