"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
— Carl Jung

If you’ve found yourself here, you may be feeling the impact of relating with another. Connection—whether romantic, platonic, or familial—is essential to our well-being, yet it can be deeply challenging. I work with individuals, couples, and families to ease the tension that often arises in relationships.

I work well with people who:
- Want to improve communication during conflict
- Crave more depth, connection, and intimacy
- Feel heavy, anxious, stuck, or burnt out
- Have a creative spirit
- Are navigating polyamory or ethical non-monogamy

By slowing our automatic responses—whether in conflict with ourselves or others—we make space to ask: What’s really happening? What do I need? How can I express that clearly? In couples work: How can I share this in a way my partner can truly hear? When we name and express our needs and emotions, our relationships—with ourselves and others—grow stronger.

I’m passionate about helping my clients access and express their authentic selves. Often, our authentic selves get covered up by years of people-pleasing, masking, or trying to fit into a certain mold. You might have learned that expressing yourself authentically wasn’t safe in your household, school, community, or previous relationships—and so you adapted. But this adaptation can bring anxiety, heaviness, anger, or even the sense that you have untapped potential.

Through warmth, humor, collaboration, and gentle challenge, I support you in noticing what lies beneath the exterior you’ve used to protect yourself over the years, allowing your true essence to reveal itself. In our work together, therapy becomes a space to slow down and explore your inner experience with curiosity and compassion.

Drawing from Gestalt therapy principles, I incorporate experiential techniques—such as mindfulness, parts work, and somatic awareness—to help you connect with your emotions and bodily sensations. This exploration often leads to a greater sense of self: increased self-confidence, self-trust, and self-compassion—and, through that, a deeper ability to engage in authentic relationships with others and the world around you.

Regardless of the reason why you seek therapy, and whether you are coming with a partner, a family member or individually, I see what we do in the room as a process of illuminating and discovering things that are easy to miss if we don’t slow down. By focusing on a thought or feeling with curiosity and gentleness, you begin on a path towards understanding your needs and expressing yourself authentically. Through this, you begin to feel the full spectrum of emotions, to have meaningful and fulfilling relationships and to become the person and partner you want to be. At the heart of this, I believe, is the cultivation and nourishment of your inner wisdom.

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." — E.E. Cummings

As a therapist, I am warm, authentic, and deeply curious. The approach I take is collaborative and I take an active role in our dialogue. I use “parts” language to describe the complexity of our psyches. What this means is that together we will build awareness of the many parts of ourselves, including parts that may be in conflict and make us feel stuck. I believe we are at our healthiest when all of our parts can have a voice. In therapy with me, I invite you to notice and become familiar with all parts of you.

I incorporate mindfulness practices to promote self-regulation and self-awareness, somatic modalities to bring forth the inherent wisdom in our bodies that can be missed when we rely too heavily on our thinking minds. While I don't primarily use CBT, I have found that incorporating some tools from CBT can be a helpful adjunct to more depth oriented and soul-focused work.

I come to this field by way of an inherent and endless curiosity about people and the environments with which we interact. My curiosity led me to study cultural anthropology during undergrad in which I learned to explore the experience of living in someone else’s shoes while never forgetting how my own lens impacts my understanding of another. After years working in the education non-profit sector, I realized, in my own therapy, that my heart was yearning to go deeper and my body to move slower. I followed these heart-centered-yearings to therapy school - California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).

I graduated CIIS with a Masters in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis on Integral Counseling Psychology. This program introduced me to three modalities of counseling that I draw upon in my work today: psychodynamic, transpersonal and gestalt. I pursued further training in Gestalt therapy at Church St. Integral Counseling Center because of the ways Gestlat therapy aligned with my personal values of authenticity, self-responsibility, curiosity, anti-authoritarianism, collaboration & joy. These values continue to create the groundwork of my therapeutic practice.

Some identities I hold are cis-female, white, queer, Jewish, only-child, able-bodied & neurotypical. As someone born and raised in Massachusetts who transplanted to the Bay Area, I can also relate to the distinct cultures of each coast. I recognize that these identities have shaped who I am today, and I’m aware of the aspects of myself that have privilege and the ones that don’t. I’m interested in learning about your identities, whether they are similar or different from mine so I can help you explore the nuances of how your unique identities shape how you interact with the world.

Informed by humanistic, relational and client-centered psychotherapies, as well as EFT with couples, my approach emphasizes present moment awareness to build connections between mind, body and emotions. I view you as the expert in your own experience and value subjectivity - meaning that I recognize our life experiences may create different understandings of one phenomena. My work is to help you illuminate and explore your understanding rather than telling you what’s happening for you. My work also invites play and experimentation in that we might get up and move around the room, do art, or use our bodies to explore different ways of being.

I also see the therapy I offer as transpersonal. Soul and spirit show up everywhere: in grief and mourning, in sex and sexuality, in activism and in inner peace. I’m interested in exploring the question: what makes you come alive? What activities or experiences titillate and stimulate your liveliness and which activities mute it? Inside each of us is wisdom. Sometimes we need to peel back some layers to access it.

• Adolescent: 13-17
• Young Adult: 18-25
• Adults: 26-65
• Seniors: 65+

• Individuals
• Couples
• Polyamorous relationship groupings
• Families

• Autistic
• Biracial
• Bisexual
• Couples/Married/Romantic/Sexual Relationships
• Fat
• Gay
• Health At Every Size (HAES)
• Healthcare Workers
• Highly Sensitive People
• Jewish
• Lesbian
• Men
• Neurodivergent
• Polyamorous / Non-Monogamous
• Queer
• Therapists
• Women

• ADHD
• Anxiety
• Autism
• Body Image
• Burnout
• Codependency
• Intercultural or Interfaith Relationships
• Medical Trauma and Healing
• Polyamory, Non-Monogamy, Open Relationships
• Racial / Ethnic / Cultural Identity
• Self-Esteem/Worth/Compassion
• Social Anxiety
• Spiritual or Religious Trauma/Abuse
• Stress
• Stages of Life

• Attachment Theory
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
• Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
• Expressive Arts Therapy
• Gestalt Therapy
• Internal Family Systems (IFS)
• Liberation / Decolonized Psychology
• Somatic Psychotherapy
• Transpersonal Psychology
• Trauma-Informed

• Bisexual
• Cisgender
• Jewish
• Queer
• White / European Descent

3150 18th St., San Francisco, 94110

• Air Purifier
• Animal-Friendly
• Gender-Neutral Bathroom
• Health at Every Size Friendly
• Public Transportation Accessible
• Street Parking (Paid)

• Credit Card

Individuals - $175; Couples - $200

$130+

• Weekdays

Please email me to set up a free 20 minute consultation call to see if we're a good fit and coordinate schedules.

Rayne Banneck, LMFT #124607

06/28/2025