Renee Chen(She/Her/Hers)

Many of the people Renee works with hold marginalized identities and come from immigrant or cross-cultural families with a history of complex trauma. Renee holds a Masters in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Integral Counseling Psychology — a holistic, mind-body-spirit approach to psychology and wellbeing — from California Institute of Integral Studies, and a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies from the University of California in Berkeley. Her clinical training at the Marina Counseling Center centered humanistic, existential and depth psychologies, and her training at Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS) was grounded in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. It is there that she developed an expertise working with individuals navigating intense emotional states, deep relational wounds, and experiences that feel disorienting or overwhelming, such as altered perceptions of reality. She also had the privilege of working with diverse immigrant populations.

In her practice, Renee integrates the teachings of different teachers and modalities from her education and training, with indigenous and Eastern wisdom traditions — such as Buddhism and Taoism — that honor dreams, images, words and sounds, synchronicities, and the body as intelligent and important ways of knowing. Her experiences as a yoga teacher and engagement with contemplative practices influence the way she sits with and listens to her patients. She engages in ongoing supervision, consultation, trainings and my own personal therapy to best support the people she works with. Prior to becoming a therapist, Renee worked in the fashion, photography, wellness, travel and start-up industries in Asia and the US where she collaborated with creatives, corporate professionals and globally-minded entrepreneurs.

Renee has an office in Berkeley, CA where she sees individuals, couples and families in person, and provides online therapy to those in California.