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.
I want our conversations to have substance and direction, and for you to leave each session with something useful to work with: a skill, a tool, a resource, or a different 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.
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 work as a therapist, 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.
Individual Therapy
Intelligence, Insight, and Self-Understanding
Individual therapy can begin with a specific concern or with a more general sense that something in your life needs attention. You may be considering a career change, struggling in a relationship, dealing with anxiety, drinking more than you want to, facing family problems, or wondering why reaching your goals has not made you feel the way you thought it would.
Many of my clients are exceptionally good thinkers. They have often spent considerable time trying to understand themselves and may already have a sophisticated explanation for where a pattern came from and why it continues. They can identify family dynamics, understand their own defenses, and explain what they probably should do differently. Insight is useful, although understanding the origin of a response does not necessarily change the response itself.
There are points in therapy when continued analysis adds very little. We may slow things down and pay closer attention to what you feel and experience physically, particularly when your intellectual understanding is considerably ahead of your ability to respond differently. I also use Accelerated Resolution Therapy when appropriate for trauma, disturbing memories, anxiety, grief, betrayal, and experiences that continue to produce a strong emotional or physical response.
Individual therapy may include work around:
- Anxiety and perfectionism
- Executive burnout and career stress
- Identity, ambition, purpose, meaning, and legacy
- Family and parenting
- Boundaries and difficult decisions
- Trauma and painful experiences
- Overwork, drinking, and other ways of coping
- Grief, loss, and major transitions
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. A relationship may also be in crisis, with both people trying to understand what has happened.
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 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, the conditions surrounding it, how each person experienced the relationship, what each person needs now, and what each is willing to contribute from here.
Crisis work often benefits from greater structure. We may need to stabilize the immediate situation, determine what information needs to be discussed and how, establish boundaries, manage disclosure, or slow down major decisions until both partners have enough information to think carefully about them.
The work can involve repairing a relationship, deciding whether to remain in one, or finding a thoughtful way to separate. Couples therapy gives both people an opportunity to understand what has happened and make informed decisions about the relationship.
Areas of 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 counseling
- Parenting and blended families
- Grief, loss, and major transitions
- Extended family and in-law conflict
- Couples intensives
Therapy for Executives, Founders, and Professionals
Senior responsibility can narrow the number of people with whom you can speak candidly. Colleagues have interests of their own, employees experience you through your role, and the people closest to you may be affected by the decisions you are trying to make.
My previous career gives me a working familiarity with these environments. We do not need to spend half the session translating the professional context before we can discuss what it means for you.
The work may involve executive burnout, a company exit, professional identity, marriage, family, money, alcohol, loneliness, or a decision you cannot discuss freely elsewhere. Therapy provides a confidential place to think carefully and speak plainly without also managing the response of someone who has a stake in the outcome.
Trust and Discretion
My practice is private pay, and I do not submit claims to insurance companies. I can provide a superbill if you would like to seek out-of-network reimbursement. I maintain a discreet office environment and take your privacy seriously, particularly given the personal and professional sensitivity of the subjects clients often discuss here.
Decisions, Transitions, and What Comes Next
Some decisions are difficult because several reasonable considerations point in different directions. Leaving or remaining in a relationship, selling a company or continuing to build it, changing careers, taking a financial risk, forgiving a betrayal, relocating a family, or deciding how much more of your life you want to devote to a particular ambition can involve competing obligations that do not resolve themselves through a simple calculation.
The context surrounding these decisions also changes over time. A company is sold, a career ends or changes direction, a marriage ends or a new relationship begins, children leave home, a parent dies, health changes, or a milestone birthday prompts a different assessment of time. The decision that made sense at 35 may look different at 55. Professional ambition can feel different after financial security has been established, just as the balance between work and family changes as children grow older.
These periods can raise questions that have been easier to postpone:
- 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?
Therapy in Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles, and Throughout California
I see clients in person at my private office in Hermosa Beach, serving Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes, 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
Couples sessions
Extended sessions and half-day intensives
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. Candidate, Clinical SexologyModern Sex Therapy Institutes, with a focus on intimacy, communication, and sexual health.
Advanced training includes Relational Life Therapy, Gottman Method Couples Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Accelerated Resolution Therapy, trauma-focused therapy, mediation, and dispute resolution.