Irene Velasco, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist

You have been holding a lot for a long time. Maybe it's the weight of a family that loved you in ways you couldn't always receive. Maybe it's the exhaustion of living between two cultures and never feeling fully at home in either. Maybe it's the quiet voice that keeps asking — is this all there is? You don't have to translate yourself here. I am a multilingual Filipino-American Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with sixteen years of experience, and an official external provider for faculty and staff at UCSF and UC Berkeley. I specialize in helping adult children of immigrants navigate anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and intergenerational conflict — with a multicultural framework that honors your cultural context rather than measuring you against Western-default standards of emotional expression. My approach is trauma-informed and grounded in evidence-based practices including CBT, psychodynamic therapy, and solution-focused work. But more than any technique, what I bring to every session is the deep conviction that you deserve to be met exactly where you are — without judgment, without condition, and without having to explain yourself. I come to this work not just as a clinician but as someone who has lived it. I am a Filipino immigrant who has navigated two countries, two cultures, and the particular complexity of loving a family across a language gap. I understand firsthand what it means to carry things that don't have easy words in either language — and what it costs to keep carrying them alone. My clinical and academic work reflects a commitment to expanding how the mental health field understands empathy across cultures. In April 2026, I presented "Empathy in Therapy: The Foundation of Cure" to licensed psychologists and postdoctoral fellows at UCSF. My paper on multicultural empathy frameworks is currently under peer review at the Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. In our sessions, you can expect honesty, warmth, and a space that is genuinely yours. We will work at your pace, toward goals that are meaningful to you — not a generic version of wellness, but the specific, particular life you actually want. I do not believe in fixing people. People are not broken. I believe in sitting with someone long enough, and honestly enough, that they begin to remember who they were before the world told them who to be. If that sounds like the kind of work you are ready for, I would be honored to hear from you.

Beyond individual and couples therapy, Irene offers a monthly consultation group open to both clinicians and the general public. She also presents on multicultural empathy frameworks to clinical and academic audiences, including her presentation "Empathy in Therapy: The Foundation of Cure," delivered to psychologists and postdoctoral fellows at UCSF in April 2026. Speaking engagements and group inquiries are welcome.