I'm Eleana.

Originally from Greece, I moved to the United States as an immigrant and came to this work by living a lot of other lives first. I grew up understanding performance: what it takes, what it costs and what resides behind it. I know the gap between who you appear to be and who you actually are at the core.

Before this I studied cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology in Athens, had twenty years of classical piano training, studied international relations at Tufts, then spent a decade working in philanthropy and cultural strategy — in rooms where the stakes were real, power was omnipresent and discretion was non-negotiable. The move into psychotherapy was an attempt to explore the real question running underneath all of it: how does power shape the self? What gets buried when you perform under authority long enough that you forget you're performing? And, with patience and humor, beginning to reclaim it.

I'm psychodynamically and psychoanalytically informed, with a particular draw to the Jungian tradition — myth, archetype, the parts of the psyche that speak in images rather than explanations. My style is directive and I tend to ask challenging questions; if you’re only looking for validation, this is not the right place for you. I take the work seriously, though I don't think serious has to mean solemn — humor is often the fastest route to a truth that's otherwise hard to approach directly. I work in English and Greek, in person in San Francisco and online throughout California.