"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."
— James Baldwin
You're here because something needs to change.
You may not be able to name it precisely yet. But something isn't working, and you're ready to do something about it.
Maybe you've been thinking about this for a while. Sitting with a decision that won't resolve itself, a transition that feels necessary but uncertain, or a question about what comes next that you haven't been able to answer alone. Whatever brought you to this page, something in your life doesn't look the way you expected it to.
Not because you haven't worked hard enough or made the right moves. You have. And yet there's a persistent sense that something is off. A disconnection between the life you've built and how it actually feels to live it.
The relationships that matter most are harder than they should be. The pressure to keep performing, producing, holding it together, has become its own kind of weight. And the cycles that keep repeating, in your relationships, in your own head, are exhausting in a way that's hard to admit to most people in your life.
You don't need someone to tell you what you already know. You need someone who can help you understand why, and what to actually do about it.
You are in the right place.
Depth, Discretion, and Real Change
My approach is built on a single premise:
Insight without action is just observation.
Direct & Active
I am a vocal and active presence in the room. I share observations, challenge patterns as they emerge, and offer perspective grounded in clinical training and firsthand understanding of the world you navigate.
Depth-Focused
We look at the past to understand how you were shaped, not to ruminate in it. How you relate to me in the room is often a precise blueprint for how you relate to everyone else — and that becomes some of our most useful material.
Oriented Toward Action
You will leave each session with a clearer understanding of what is actually driving your experience and something concrete to apply before we meet again. Sessions move with intention because I respect your time.
Completely Confidential
This practice serves executives, founders, lawyers, and high-achieving professionals in Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, and across California via telehealth. Your privacy is treated with the same care as the work itself.
What to Expect in Our Work
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. Executives, lawyers, founders, and high achievers 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. Most couples have been having the same argument 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. -
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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.
What to Expect in Our Work
If you have tried therapy before and found it passive, you will find this work different.
I am a vocal and active presence in the room. I share observations, challenge patterns as they emerge, and offer perspective grounded in clinical training and firsthand understanding of the world you navigate. Sessions move with intention because I respect your time and I know you are looking for more than a place to vent.
We look at the past to understand how you were shaped, not to ruminate in it. How you relate to me in the room is often a precise blueprint for how you relate to everyone else, and that becomes some of our most useful material.
You will leave each session with a clearer understanding of what is actually driving your experience and something concrete to apply before we meet again. This is accountable, substantive work. It is also completely confidential.
This practice serves executives, founders, lawyers, and high-achieving professionals and couples in Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, and across California via telehealth.
About Me
A Different Kind of Perspective
I came to this work the long way, and that matters. For twenty years, I operated in the same high-stakes environments most of my clients do. Before I was a therapist, I was a structured finance lawyer and investment banker. I worked at Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland, and served as General Counsel and Head of Product at several companies that reached unicorn valuations. I co-founded FinDox and saw it through a successful exit. For two decades, I operated in environments where performance was the only currency and showing difficulty was a liability.
I also did the harder, slower work of understanding myself honestly enough to actually change. Not as an intellectual exercise. As a necessity.
That combination means when you sit across from me, you are not talking to someone who learned your world from a textbook. I recognize the specific cost of keeping everything together when no one is watching. I understand how competence becomes its own kind of armor. And I know what it looks like to have a resume that reads as evidence of a life going well while something quieter and more important goes unattended.
Beyond the Symptoms
I work with people who are ready to understand themselves at a level that actually changes something. Founders, lawyers, executives, and couples who have built impressive lives and are hitting a wall they cannot think their way through. My approach is psychodynamic and depth-focused, which means we are not putting a better frame on the same picture. We are tracing what is actually driving your experience back to its source, through weekly sessions or accelerated intensives designed for people who do not have time to waste.
The Practice
This is a private, cash-pay practice. I do not work with insurance because I prioritize your privacy and a level of personalized attention that the standard model does not allow.
I am an active, direct presence in the room. I will notice things and say them. I will challenge what needs to be challenged. And I will take your time seriously, because I understand what it costs you to be here.
The goal is a steadiness in yourself and your relationships that does not depend on everything going well. That is the kind of confidence that actually holds.
- B.A. (Summa Cum Laude), University of Michigan
- J.D., University of Michigan Law School
- M.A. Marriage and Family Therapy, Pepperdine Graduate School of Education and Psychology
- Ph.D. Candidate, Clinical Sexology — intimacy, communication, and sexual health
- Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist #148775
- Member, California and New York Bar Associations
- Relational Life Therapy (RLT)
- Gottman Method Couples Therapy
- Intensive Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Basic and Advanced Mediation and Dispute Resolution
The Hermosa Beach Office
Located in Hermosa Beach
Evening and weekend availability for in-person and virtual sessions statewide.
Telehealth available throughout California
Contact Info:
Hermosa Beach Office
2309 Pacific Coast Hwy Suite #202
Hermosa Beach, CA 90254-2751
Phone Number & Email
(323) 646-6263
info@reginaabayev.com