You’re here because something needs to change.
I work with individuals and couples navigating complicated personal and professional lives. Many are executives, founders, attorneys, physicians, business owners, and other accomplished people who value thoughtful, substantive therapy and are looking for change and growth.
My approach is active, direct, and trauma-informed. I listen closely, ask thoughtful, deepening questions, offer observations, and help clients consider their lives from perspectives they may not have explored before. Accountability is part of the work, including the willingness to examine our own choices and contributions without reducing complicated situations to fault or blame. We consider the immediate question and the larger context: how you came to think as you do, what influences your choices, what you want, and what deserves closer examination.
Clients appreciate that our conversations have substance and direction. They leave with a clearer understanding of themselves and something useful to work with, whether that is a new skill, tool, resource, or way of approaching a problem.
Therapy That Considers the Whole Person
Few people come to therapy with a single, self-contained problem. Work affects marriage. Money influences freedom and responsibility. Childhood experiences can surface in parenting. Success changes relationships. A decision that appears straightforward can involve loyalty, identity, ambition, fear, family, and competing ideas about the life someone wants to lead.
That can take us into family history, attachment, ambition, identity, money, work, intimacy, parenting, friendship, health, loss, or questions of purpose and meaning. We can be practical when a problem calls for practical thinking and go considerably deeper when there is more to understand.
The objective is not insight for its own sake. We identify what you want to change, understand what may be getting in the way, and work deliberately toward your goals. Depending on what you need, that can involve developing new skills, changing established patterns, becoming more comfortable with difficult emotions, considering different perspectives, or approaching an important decision with greater clarity.
Clients often gain greater agency in their lives: they become more confident in their judgment, more comfortable with themselves, more deliberate in their choices, and better able to handle complexity without being overwhelmed by it.
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.James Baldwin
Experience Beyond the Therapy Room
Before becoming a therapist, I spent nearly two decades in law, institutional finance, technology, and entrepreneurship. I worked in structured finance and investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland, held senior legal and product roles in technology companies, and co-founded and led a fintech company through its acquisition.
Those years put me alongside people at consequential points in their lives: building companies, managing risk, making difficult decisions, raising families, succeeding, failing, starting again, and reconsidering what they wanted once circumstances changed.
All of it now informs my clinical work, giving me an intuitive understanding of the professional environments many of my clients navigate while keeping the focus where it belongs: on the person, not the position.
My clinical work draws from advanced training in couples therapy, trauma, intimacy, conflict, and relational work.
Individual Therapy
Intelligence, Insight, and Self-Understanding
Individual therapy can begin with a specific problem or with the recognition that something needs attention. You may be considering a career change, navigating a relationship, questioning how you are spending your time, struggling with anxiety, drinking more than you want to, dealing with family problems, or wondering why reaching your goals hasn’t made you feel the way you thought it would.
For some clients, the work is highly practical. There is a decision to make, a conversation to have, a boundary to establish, or a problem to solve.
Other work takes us further back. We may look at family history, attachment, shame, insecurity, ambition, loss, trauma, or the experiences that shaped how you learned to understand yourself and other people. That work is trauma-informed. We move at a pace you can tolerate, and you decide how much to open up and when.
Many of my clients are exceptionally good thinkers. Thinking can also become a way to remain at a comfortable distance from emotion. When intellectual understanding is no longer enough, therapy can become more experiential. We slow things down, pay attention to what is happening in the body, work with emotion rather than only explaining it, and use approaches such as Accelerated Resolution Therapy when appropriate.
The point is not to become less analytical. It is to have access to more of yourself.
Individual therapy may include work around:
- Anxiety and perfectionism
- Executive burnout and career stress
- Identity, ambition, purpose, meaning, and legacy
- Relationships and emotional intimacy
- Family and parenting
- Boundaries and difficult decisions
- Grief and loss
- Trauma and painful experiences
- Alcohol, substances, and other forms of coping
- Compulsive behaviors
- Isolation and disconnection
- Major transitions and periods of change
Couples Therapy for Complex Relationships
Couples come to therapy for very different reasons. Some want to strengthen a good relationship before marriage or another major transition. Others have become disconnected and want to understand what has changed. Some arrive in the middle of a crisis, when the future of the relationship is uncertain and decisions need to be made carefully.
I work extensively with couples navigating infidelity and betrayal, emotional and physical disconnection, recurring conflict, financial disagreements, intimacy concerns, difficult family dynamics, and periods of significant stress or transition.
Couples therapy with me is active. Both partners need room to be understood, including the partner whose behavior is under scrutiny. I am interested in what happened, but also in the conditions surrounding it, how each person experienced the relationship, what each person needs now, and what each is willing to contribute to what comes next.
In crisis work, structure can be particularly important. We may need to stabilize the immediate situation, determine what information needs to be discussed and how, establish boundaries, manage disclosure, or slow down decisions until both partners have enough information to make them thoughtfully.
The objective is not to preserve every relationship at any cost. It is to help two people understand what has happened, communicate more effectively, and make considered decisions about what they want to build from here.
Areas of particular focus include:
- Infidelity and betrayal
- Emotional intimacy and disconnection
- Physical intimacy
- Conflict around money and finances
- High-conflict relationships
- Recurring conflict and communication
- Premarital counseling
- Relationship crisis
- Discernment and difficult decisions
- Parenting and blended families
- Grief, loss, and major transitions
- Extended family and in-law conflict
- Couples intensives
Therapy for Executives, Founders, and Professionals
Professional success can create opportunities, freedom, responsibility, and pressure, often at the same time.
I work with executives, entrepreneurs, founders, attorneys, physicians, investors, consultants, business owners, and other professionals whose personal lives cannot always be separated neatly from their work.
The subjects we discuss are not limited to work stress. They may include marriage, parenting, money, aging parents, friendship, alcohol, sex, health, identity, legacy, loneliness, an exit from a company, a business failure, a change in status, or the question of what comes next after achieving something that took years or decades to build.
For founders and executives in particular, the people available for candid conversation can become fewer as responsibility increases. Therapy provides a confidential place to examine decisions and their consequences without having to manage anyone else's response.
Trust and Discretion
Some things are difficult to say to anyone, particularly when the rest of your life requires you to maintain a certain level of composure. My practice is private pay, and I do not submit claims to insurance companies. I also maintain a discreet office environment and take confidentiality seriously.
You should be able to speak honestly about what is happening without having to manage how it sounds or how it looks. That is part of what makes good therapy possible.
You do not need a therapist who is impressed by your résumé. You need someone interested enough to understand the person who built it.
How We Work
Therapy can take different forms depending on what we are working on. At times, the most useful work is conversational: understanding an experience more fully, making connections, considering a different perspective, or thinking carefully through a decision. At other times, the work is more experiential, focused on emotion, physical responses, or experiences that continue to affect you in the present. Practical tools and new skills also have an important place when they help create change outside the therapy room.
My training allows us to draw from different approaches rather than trying to fit every person or problem into the same method. I use Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) when it is appropriate for trauma, disturbing memories, betrayal, grief, anxiety, and other experiences that continue to have an emotional or physical impact. My work with couples is informed by Relational Life Therapy (RLT), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and the Gottman Method, as well as training in trauma, intimacy, mediation, and conflict resolution.
The approach depends on you, what we are trying to accomplish, and what is most useful in helping you get there.
Therapy for Complicated Decisions
Stay or leave.
Sell or keep building.
Tell someone or remain silent.
Take the risk or protect what you have.
Forgive or decide that something has changed permanently.
Keep pursuing the life you planned or admit that you want something different.
Therapy can provide room to examine a decision from more than one perspective. We can look at motivation, consequences, competing obligations, family systems, fear, desire, financial considerations, identity, and what each choice would mean for you.
The work is to understand the decision from different angles, clarify what is most important to you, and help you arrive at a choice that is your own.
Transitions, Meaning, and Identity
I often work with clients at transition points: selling a company or stepping away from one, retiring or changing careers, the end of a marriage or the start of a new one, children leaving home, the death of a parent, a health scare, or a milestone birthday that lands harder than expected. Some of these are chosen and some arrive without warning. Either way, the structure that organized someone’s time and sense of self shifts, and questions that were easy to postpone become harder to ignore.
At these points, context matters. The same decision means something different at 35 than at 55, in the middle of a divorce than a year after it, with young children at home than with an empty house. We look at what you are leaving behind, which obligations still hold, and what you want the next stretch of your life to be organized around. The decisions ahead are practical as well as personal: how to spend your time, what to say yes to, who you want close, and what you are no longer willing to carry.
At different points in therapy, I may ask clients to consider questions that are intentionally larger than the problem that brought them in.
- 01What do you want your time to be spent on?
- 02What did you imagine for yourself before you became preoccupied with being successful at it?
- 03What would change if you knew your time, or the time you had with someone you love, was shorter than you assumed?
- 04Have you ever felt that what you had done was enough?
The answers often shape the concrete decisions that follow: how much to work, where to live, which relationships to invest in, and what to do with the time and resources you have.
Therapy in Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles, and Throughout California
I see clients in person at my private office in Hermosa Beach, serving the South Bay and greater Los Angeles. Clients also travel from other parts of Los Angeles for individual therapy, couples therapy, and extended sessions.
Secure telehealth is available throughout California for clients whose schedules or locations make virtual therapy more practical.
Individual sessions are 50 minutes.
Couples sessions are 55 minutes.
Extended 90-minute sessions and half-day intensives are available when a longer format is clinically appropriate.
My practice is private pay and does not participate with insurance.
Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, California #148775
In-person psychotherapy in Hermosa Beach.
Online psychotherapy throughout California.
- B.A., Summa Cum LaudeUniversity of Michigan
- J.D.University of Michigan Law School
- M.A., Marriage and Family TherapyPepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology
- Ph.D. coursework completed in Clinical SexologyThrough the Modern Sex Therapy Institutes, with a focus on intimacy, communication, and sexual health. Dissertation project in progress.
Advanced training includes Relational Life Therapy, Gottman Method Couples Therapy, Accelerated Resolution Therapy, trauma-focused therapy, mediation, and dispute resolution.