Couples Therapy | Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT | Hermosa Beach, CA

Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT·Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist #148775·Hermosa Beach, California

The Practice

A demanding career can be deeply satisfying. Work can provide intellectual challenge, financial security, competition, purpose, autonomy, and opportunities that would have been difficult to imagine earlier in your life. As a career develops, the demands tend to change with it. A larger company, a more senior role, greater wealth, increased visibility, or responsibility for more people can require different ways of managing time, relationships, expectations, and yourself.

The effects extend beyond work. A spouse or partner may want more of your attention. Children need different things from you as they grow. Exercise, sleep, friendships, medical care, and interests outside work compete for time that already feels allocated. You may find yourself drinking more than you want, staying at work because it is easier than dealing with what is happening at home, agreeing to things you resent, or remaining remarkably responsive to other people’s expectations while paying less attention to your own.

These are relational questions as much as professional ones. They concern how you want to function as a spouse or partner, parent, friend, leader, and person with a body and a life outside work. They also include your relationship with yourself: what you expect from yourself, how much of your identity depends on being productive or needed, how you respond when you disappoint someone, and whether the life you have built still reflects what you want.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent nineteen years in law, structured finance, investment banking, technology, leadership, and entrepreneurship. I worked in demanding professional environments and later co-founded and helped build a company through its sale to private equity. I understand much of the professional context already, which leaves us more time to understand you.

Work With Me
Regina Abayev JD, LMFT

"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."

James Baldwin

What We Work On

People seek therapy at very different points in their professional and personal lives. Work may be going extremely well while a marriage is struggling, a relationship with a child has become difficult, health has received too little attention, or a coping strategy has become harder to control. At other times, professional growth itself creates new questions about responsibility, identity, relationships, and how you want to live.

01 Relationships, Marriage & Family Relational difficulties are frequently what bring successful people to therapy. A partner may experience your work as receiving the best of your attention while the family receives what remains. You may believe that the time and energy you devote to work are part of taking care of the people you love. Both experiences can influence the relationship.The same complexity can arise with children. Providing opportunities, financial security, and a stable home is meaningful, while children also develop their own needs for attention, emotional availability, limits, and connection. As they get older, differences in temperament, values, expectations, or the amount of time you have available can become harder to navigate.Individual therapy gives us a place to look closely at how you participate in these relationships, including how you communicate, respond to disappointment, manage conflict, express affection, set limits, and repair when things go badly. When a marriage or partnership needs to become the primary focus, we can discuss couples therapy.
02 Growth, Responsibility & Other People’s Expectations Professional growth increases the number of people with legitimate claims on your attention. Employees need decisions, clients expect responsiveness, partners and investors have priorities, and family members have needs of their own. Leadership requires deciding which demands deserve your attention and accepting that some people will be disappointed by those decisions.The habits that helped you advance can become complicated as your responsibilities increase. Working harder, solving problems yourself, remaining highly available, or becoming the person who can always be counted on may eventually make delegation difficult and leave too little distinction between being responsible and feeling responsible for everything.We look at how you respond to authority, obligation, conflict, disappointment, and other people’s expectations, particularly when your instinct is to accommodate, rescue, reassure, take over, or agree before deciding what you want.
03 Ambition, Achievement & Your Relationship With Yourself Ambition can be pleasurable, creative, competitive, financially rewarding, and deeply connected to a sense of purpose. There is no therapeutic virtue in wanting less simply because someone else thinks your life would look healthier that way.Achievement can also become closely connected to identity, security, status, family expectations, or self-worth. Reaching one objective can quickly establish the next, leaving little opportunity to consider whether the pursuit remains meaningful or whether the standard for feeling successful keeps moving.This part of the work involves understanding what you want from achievement now, what you expect it to provide, and what happens internally when you are unproductive, uncertain, unsuccessful, or unable to meet your own expectations. The aim is greater choice about what you pursue and what you are willing to give it.
04 Health, Capacity & a Life Outside Work A demanding career takes time and energy, and periods of intense work may be entirely reasonable. Difficulties develop when sleep, exercise, medical care, friendships, sex, recreation, or time alone repeatedly receive whatever remains after professional obligations have been satisfied.This can happen gradually. Each decision makes sense on its own: one missed workout, another late dinner, a canceled appointment, a weekend spent catching up. The cumulative effect may become visible only after the arrangement has been in place for quite a while.We look at whether the way you are working remains compatible with your health and the rest of the life you value. Working less is not automatically the answer. The questions concern capacity, priorities, and whether you are making these tradeoffs deliberately or repeating them by default.
05 Drinking, Overworking & Other Ways of Coping Alcohol can make the transition out of a demanding day easier. Work can provide relief from conflict, loneliness, anxiety, boredom, or feelings that are harder to manage than the problems waiting at the office. Spending, food, exercise, pornography, drugs, and other behaviors can serve similar purposes.A behavior deserves attention before it becomes catastrophic. You may notice that you are drinking more than you want, finding reasons to remain at work, becoming increasingly dependent on a behavior during periods of pressure, hiding it from someone close to you, or feeling uncomfortable with how difficult it has become to change.We look at what happens before the behavior, what it provides while you are engaged in it, what follows afterward, and what becomes harder to tolerate without it. Understanding its function allows us to address the behavior directly without reducing the discussion to shame or willpower.
06 Transitions, Success & What Comes Next Transitions can require substantial psychological adjustment even when they represent success. Making partner, becoming CEO, selling a company, reaching financial independence, assuming responsibility for a larger organization, leaving an operating role, or achieving a goal that organized years of your life can change daily routines as well as relationships and expectations for the future.Money can change family dynamics. Greater professional authority can change friendships and collegial relationships. An exit can remove the structure and urgency that organized your days. Children leaving home, changes in a marriage, aging parents, or concerns about your own health may be occurring at the same time.These periods create an opportunity to reconsider decisions and priorities established at an earlier stage of life. What you wanted at thirty may have served you exceptionally well and still deserve reconsideration at forty-five or sixty.
07 Difficult Decisions, Conflict & Setbacks Professional life also includes periods when the available choices are genuinely difficult. A partnership may deteriorate, a board may lose confidence, a transaction may fail, or you may have to terminate people you respect, close a business, leave a profession, confront an ethical conflict, or make a decision in which every option carries a cost.Analysis is useful, but some decisions remain difficult after the facts have been gathered and the alternatives considered. Fear, loyalty, guilt, ambition, anger, financial interests, relationships, and responsibility can all influence judgment.Our work can separate the parts of a decision that can be analyzed from the personal considerations that also deserve attention, including what you want, what you fear losing, what responsibility belongs to you, and which consequences you are prepared to accept.
Therapy and Executive Coaching

How Therapy Differs From Executive Coaching

Executive coaching generally begins with a professional objective, such as leadership, performance, communication, organizational effectiveness, or navigating a new role. Psychotherapy has a broader clinical scope, allowing professional concerns to be considered alongside relationships, anxiety, coping, identity, family history, grief, trauma, and other aspects of a person’s life.

I am a licensed therapist, and the work we do together is psychotherapy. Some clients also work with an executive coach, with each relationship serving a different purpose.

How I Work
Direct, Active & Engaged

I listen closely, ask challenging questions, offer interpretations, and share what I see. I pay attention to contradictions, avoidance, resistance, and the places where change becomes harder than expected. Our work may involve examining your contribution to a painful relationship, reconsidering a behavior that provides temporary relief, staying with an emotion you would prefer to resolve quickly, or accepting consequences that cannot be eliminated through further analysis.

Depth Without Endless Analysis

Many of the people I work with are exceptionally good thinkers and have spent considerable time trying to understand themselves. You may know where a response came from, recognize it while it is happening, and explain accurately why it continues without being able to respond differently.

We use insight to understand the history and function of a behavior, then pay close attention to what happens when you try to change it. Understanding yourself and taking responsibility for your choices belong in the same process.

Trust & Discretion

My practice is private pay, and I do not submit claims directly to insurance companies. Treatment does not pass through an employer-sponsored health plan unless you choose to submit documentation for reimbursement yourself. I maintain a discreet private office in Hermosa Beach and provide secure telehealth throughout California.

Let’s Begin
Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT

My professional background includes nineteen years in law, finance, technology, leadership, and entrepreneurship before I became a therapist.

Education J.D., University of Michigan Law School
M.A., Marriage and Family Therapy, Pepperdine University
Ph.D. coursework in Clinical Sexology
License Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist #148775
Advanced Training Emotionally Focused Therapy · Gottman Method Couples Therapy · Relational Life Therapy · Accelerated Resolution Therapy · Advanced Mediation & Dispute Resolution
Full Biography →
The Office  ·  Hermosa Beach, California

A private practice space designed for serious work, with a view of the Pacific.

Questions From Executives, Founders & Professionals

Do I need to be struggling at work for therapy to be useful?

No. Professional success and personal difficulty readily coexist. People come to therapy to work on marriages and other relationships, parenting, health, drinking or other coping behaviors, anxiety, major decisions, questions about identity and ambition, and periods of transition. Work may be central to what is happening, one influence among several, or going exceptionally well.

Is this therapy or executive coaching?

It is psychotherapy. Professional decisions, leadership, and performance can be part of our work, along with relationships, emotional health, coping, identity, family history, and other aspects of your life. If you already work with an executive coach, the two relationships can serve different purposes.

Will my company, partners, board, or investors know I am in therapy?

Not from me. Psychotherapy is confidential, subject to limited legal exceptions that I review with you at the beginning of treatment. Because my practice is private pay, treatment does not go through an employer-sponsored health plan or employee assistance program unless you choose to submit documentation for reimbursement.

Can sessions accommodate travel and an unpredictable schedule?

Sessions are available in my Hermosa Beach office and online while you are physically located in California. Clients who travel frequently can use both formats depending on their schedules.

Can my partner join a session?

Yes, when it would be clinically useful. A joint session can help when an issue you are addressing individually directly affects your partner. If the relationship itself becomes the focus, we can discuss whether couples therapy would better serve the work.

Further Reading

High Achievement and Shame: The Cost of Performance-Based Worth

The relationship between achievement, self-worth, and the pressure to continue proving yourself.

Intellectualization: The Defense of All Defenses

How intelligence can provide insight while also creating distance from emotional experience.

Burnout and the Habit of Pushing Through

How burnout develops in people who continue functioning while exceeding what they can sustain.

Intelligence and Terminal Uniqueness

How intelligence can become exceptionally useful in explaining why a principle that readily applies to other people does not quite apply to you.

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Therapy in Hermosa Beach and Across California

I work with executives, founders, business owners, attorneys, physicians, finance professionals, and other high-achieving adults in person in Hermosa Beach and through telehealth throughout California.

Let’s Begin Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT  ·  Hermosa Beach, CA  ·  info@reginaabayev.com