Dr. Nicole Strauss, PhD
PSY # 34677 (California)
Hi! I’m Nicole.
I’m so glad you’re here.
I became a psychologist because I believe something deeply: that every person is worthy of love. Not once they've healed enough, not once they've figured themselves out, not once they've become someone easier to be around. Right now. Exactly as they are.
That's not a therapeutic stance I adopted in graduate school. It's something I had to find my way to myself.
I grew up as a highly sensitive person in a home that wasn't quite built for someone like me. I know what it is like to feel like a mismatch in the place that was supposed to be safest. To learn early to suppress what I felt, to manage the emotional climate around me, to go looking for love and validation in early adult relationships that ultimately couldn't offer it in the ways I needed, and to keep going back anyway because I didn't yet know there was another way. To not know my own needs as an adult because I had spent so long focused on everyone else's. To carry the quiet, persistent belief that I was somehow too much and not enough at the same time. This led me down a path of deep mental and emotional suffering, and towards the deep-rooted healing journey that has inspired my work here and now.
I know what it means to “do the work”. To begin, slowly, imperfectly, and sometimes painfully, to understand my own patterns. To learn what I actually needed and then face the harder task of giving it to myself, even when every part of me wished someone else would do it for me. To find, on the other side of that more than a decade-long journey, something I genuinely didn't expect: real self-love. Real boundaries. Real connection. A life that feels like mine.
That journey is not background context for my clinical work. It IS my clinical work. It is the reason I can sit with someone in profound pain and not flinch. The reason my clients tell me they feel genuinely understood and seen, rather than managed, assessed, or handled. The reason I can say, with complete honesty, that the belief you are unworthy of love is not the truth. I know that because I once lived inside that belief too.
What I believe about healing
I am fascinated by how people actually transform. Not just how they cope, but how they become who they were always meant to be.
In my experience, real healing doesn't happen at the surface. It happens when we go beneath the symptoms, coping strategies, and stories we've been carrying, to understand where they came from, what they're protecting, and what needs to shift at the root for something to genuinely change. This depth-oriented work is slower than symptom management. It is also the only thing that actually lasts.
I also believe that the therapeutic relationship itself is healing. Not just a vehicle for delivering techniques, but the thing. Many of the people I work with have spent their entire lives feeling fundamentally misunderstood: too intense, too sensitive, too much. What changes when they experience something different (i.e., genuine attunement, real nonjudgment, someone who sees them clearly and stays) is not a small thing. It is often the beginning of everything else.
My mission, in the simplest terms I know: to guide you toward deep and soulful self-love. To help you find your way back to the truth of who you are underneath everything that got layered on top.
How I work:
My approach is psychodynamic at its foundation. We go deep, we understand patterns and their origins, and we work with the therapeutic relationship itself as a site of healing. Woven into that foundation are DBT-informed skills, compassion-focused therapy, somatic approaches, mindfulness, and spirituality-based work if applicable.
I work with adults navigating: complex trauma, shame, relationship difficulties, emotion dysregulation, chronic depression, anxiety, complex/persistent mental disorders, borderline personality disorder, and other complex personality configurations. I also offer comprehensive psychological evaluation and personality assessment.
Sessions with me are warm, direct, and genuinely human. I will meet you exactly where you are. I will not pretend everything is fine when it isn't, and I will not let you stay stuck when I can see a way through. I will also, and I mean this, never lose sight of who you are underneath what you're carrying. The wholeness is already there. We are simply finding our way back to it.
My hope is that therapy becomes a place where you can finally exhale. Where you show up fully as yourself and think: yes. This actually feels like a safe enough space for me to be me.
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✦ Licensed Clinical Psychologist, California Board of Psychology (PSY #34677)
✦ PhD in Clinical Psychology, Palo Alto University (APA Accredited), 2021
✦ MS in Clinical Psychology, Palo Alto University (APA Accredited), 2019
✦ BA in Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014
Professional Endorsements
