"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."
— James Baldwin
When things aren’t working, something needs to change.
I work with individuals and couples who are serious about their lives, their work, and their relationships. My clients include business owners, entrepreneurs, executives, attorneys, doctors, financiers, consultants, and other professionals navigating complicated personal and professional lives.
I am direct, thoughtful, and fully engaged in the work. I listen closely, ask challenging questions, share what I see, and offer perspective when it is useful. I want to understand what brings you to therapy and what may be keeping you from where you want to be.
Before becoming a therapist, I spent 19 years in management and leadership roles across law, finance, technology, and entrepreneurship. I have managed people, mentored professionals, navigated difficult personalities and decisions, built companies, and experienced the demands of professional life firsthand. I bring that experience into my work as a therapist.
My work is psychodynamic and depth-focused. I want to understand what is happening beneath the surface and how it affects the way you think, feel, and relate to other people. Insight is valuable, though it is not always enough to move us toward growth and change. I help clients understand what they feel, communicate more honestly, make difficult decisions, and live in ways that feel more aligned with who they are.
If you’re ready to do the work, let’s begin.
Depth, Discretion,
and Real Change
If you have tried therapy before and found it passive, you will find this work different.
I am fully engaged in every session. I listen closely, share what I am noticing, and challenge patterns that keep you stuck. I won’t simply reflect back what you have said. When something needs to be examined, we examine it.
Understanding the problem is only the beginning. We look past the immediate issue to understand the patterns, assumptions, and experiences shaping how you respond. The goal is not insight for its own sake. It is to understand yourself well enough to make different choices and respond differently when it matters.
Therapy should have a sense of direction. Sessions are focused on what matters, whether that means working through something that happened, making a difficult decision, changing a pattern, or deciding what comes next. We take the time the work requires without losing sight of why you came in.
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.
When your entire life is built around being the reliable one, the decision-maker who handles everything from portfolios to family crises, you quickly realize there are very few places where you can put down the weight of everyone else’s expectations.
This practice is built for people who work incredibly hard to create meaningful, fulfilling lives, but need a private space where they can focus on their own. Here, we address the pressure you carry, the parts of your relationships that feel stuck or strained, and the things that feel unfulfilling in the life you’ve worked so hard to create. A large part of this work is learning to be comfortable with both your thoughts and your feelings. For people who have spent much of their lives making sense of things through thought, feelings can be harder to understand. We make room for both, and learn how they inform one another.
Whether you are navigating a major crisis, grieving a loss, or working through patterns that impact how you show up as a partner or a leader, you don’t have to filter yourself here. You can expect to be supported, understood, and challenged as we figure out what you need to move forward.
Over time, that translates into more honest relationships, greater confidence in your decisions, and more room to feel like yourself again.
Many of the clients I work with are:At the end of our work together, I ask clients what was helpful. These responses are shared with permission.
Services
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![Individual Therapy Services for anxiety, perfectionism, lack of fullfilment, sense of nothing being good enough, lack of purpose, burnout, exhaustion, relationship issues, fear of failure, impostor syndrom.]()
Individual Therapy
For people who are exceptionally capable in most areas of their life and privately struggling in others. Those who are used to solving hard problems and have met one they can't think their way out of alone.This work goes beneath the presenting problem to understand what is actually driving it, and builds the internal capacity to handle what comes next. Sessions are direct, substantive, and oriented toward real change rather than indefinite processing.
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![Couples therapy with Regina Abayev, JD LMFT focused on rebuilding intimacy, trust, communication, reducing conflict and navigating difficult life and family transitions.]()
Couples Therapy
For couples at a genuine inflection point. Betrayal. A slow erosion of intimacy that has become impossible to ignore. High conflict that has become the default register of the relationship. The question of whether to stay or go, approached with clarity rather than reactivity. For couples earlier in their relationship, premarital work that builds a genuinely solid foundation rather than just covering the obvious topics. Often the same argument has been running for years. This work gets underneath it. -
![Family therapy focused on rebuilding trust, opening communication, healing past hurts and creating loving connection, trust and support.]()
Family Therapy
Families develop patterns that are nearly impossible to see clearly from inside them. This work helps every member of the family understand the system they are part of, take honest responsibility for their role in it, and build something more functional in its place. Including divorce, blended family transitions, and the family member who has been cast as the problem when the truth is more complicated. -
![Group therapy that is transformational and provides real-time feedback on how we are perceived, experienced and supported.]()
Group Therapy
A psychodynamic process group for people who are ready to do serious work in the company of others doing the same. Raw, honest, and deeply relational. The group becomes a live laboratory for understanding how you actually show up in relationships, not how you think you do. For the right person, the growth that happens here is exponential in a way that individual work alone cannot replicate. -
![Fallen tree with broken branches laying on a grassy ground in a park or garden with green trees in the background.]()
Infidelity & Betrayal Trauma
The discovery of an affair dismantles more than a relationship. It dismantles the version of reality you were living in. This work follows a specialized, phased approach: stabilizing the crisis, structured disclosure, genuine accountability, and repair. Betrayal trauma is among the most complex areas of couples work, and it requires a therapist with the clinical expertise and experience to guide both partners through it with honesty, skill and precision.
About Me
A Different Kind of Perspective
Before entering clinical practice, I spent 19 years working in institutional finance and technology. My work spanned structured finance and investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Royal Bank of Scotland, general counsel and product leadership at companies scaling toward unicorn valuations, and co-founding a fintech venture through to a private equity exit.
I mention that background simply to save us time. When you sit across from me, you do not have to translate the rhythm of your days, the stakes of your decisions, or the particular isolation that can come with carrying significant responsibility. I have lived inside those expectations, and I know how easily competence can become a shield. I also know how stark the divide can feel between a life that appears entirely composed on the surface and one that is fraying behind closed doors.
Beyond the Symptoms
My practice centers on founders, corporate executives, attorneys, physicians, and couples who are highly capable yet confronted by an impasse they cannot resolve alone.
Our work together is engaged, focused, and candid. Rather than lingering on surface symptoms, we look at the patterns driving the problem and address them directly, whether through ongoing weekly sessions or targeted intensives for those with demanding schedules.
The Practice
This is an independent, private-pay practice by design. Choosing not to participate in insurance networks allows for greater privacy and a more discreet practice environment.
In the room, I am not a passive observer. I listen closely, I speak plainly about what I observe, and I will challenge what needs to be examined. The objective is not to strip complexity from your life. It is to develop a greater capacity to understand yourself, remain grounded in your own judgment, and stay connected to the people who matter to you, even when life puts significant pressure on both.
The Hermosa Beach
Office
Reach out directly or visit the FAQ for more information. Evening and weekend availability for in-person and virtual sessions statewide.