You have spent years translating yourself for everyone else. Therapy should not be one more place where you have to do that.
Cultural Therapy at JiVA is built around the reality that South Asian mental health cannot be separated from South Asian life. From the pressure to perform success to the silence around struggle, from the weight of immigration to the loneliness of straddling two worlds, our work holds all of it.
Sessions are available via telehealth across all of California and in person in Los Angeles. Therapy is available in four or more South Asian languages. Sessions start at $40. If that is still out of reach, financial assistance may be available based on eligibility and current program capacity.
$1,000 funds 25 weekly sessions—approximately six months of therapy—for one community member.
Why culturally grounded therapy hits differently
Asian American and Pacific Islander adults are three times less likely to access mental health services than white adults. That gap is not about resilience. It reflects barriers in a system that was not built with our communities in mind.
When therapy does not account for cultural context, it often misses what is actually happening. A South Asian client talking about family pressure is not just describing a stressful relationship. They may also be navigating collectivism, filial obligation, shame, immigration sacrifice, and competing definitions of success.
Research indicates that culturally adapted psychological interventions can produce greater symptom improvement for people from ethnic minority groups than non-adapted approaches. JiVA’s clinical model is informed by that evidence. At JiVA, you are not asked to set your culture aside so therapy can work. Your culture is part of the work.
How we work with you
JiVA’s clinical model was developed by Ektha Aggarwal, LCSW, and draws on six evidence-based approaches. Every one of them is adapted to honor South Asian cultural realities, not work around them.
Existential and Humanistic Therapy
For second-generation South Asians navigating who they are when their family’s definition of success does not match their own. This approach centers your autonomy, your meaning-making, and your identity, not just your symptoms.
Narrative Therapy
You are not the story your family told about you. This approach helps you identify the narratives imposed by culture, trauma, or family systems and start writing your own.
Person-Centered Therapy
You will never be asked to minimize your cultural self in a JiVA session. This approach is grounded in deep listening and unconditional regard, without judgment and without the burden of performing okayness.
Psychodynamic and Adlerian Therapy
Explores how early family dynamics, birth order, intergenerational patterns, and the invisible rules of your household are still shaping how you move through relationships and work today.
Interpersonal Therapy
Addresses the relational dynamics that run through South Asian family systems: communication patterns, unspoken expectations, cultural conflict, and the strain of playing different roles for different people.
Somatic and Mind-Body Work
Stress and emotional pain can also show up physically—as headaches, tension, exhaustion, or difficulty resting. Somatic work may include breathing, grounding, movement, and body awareness when clinically appropriate and aligned with your preferences.
What changes when therapy finally fits
You stop hiding
The parts of yourself you learned to shrink for survival, around family, at work, in relationships, have room to come forward. Therapy stops asking you to be smaller.
Shame loses its grip
When your cultural experience is named and held accurately, not pathologized or dismissed, the shame around struggling starts to dissolve. That is not incidental. That is the work.
The body gets to rest
Stress and emotional pain can show up in the body as headaches, muscle tension, fatigue, or difficulty resting. Culturally grounded somatic work helps you notice those signals and build ways to regulate and process them.
Who we work with
JiVA serves South Asian individuals and families across California who are ready to stop carrying this alone.
South Asian Women and Mothers
Navigating relationships, career expectations, family roles, fertility, postpartum transitions, and the particular exhaustion of being the one who holds everyone else together. You are allowed to put that weight down.
South Asian Men
Pressure to provide, emotional restraint, identity, career, what it means to be a son or husband or father in a family where feelings were never allowed to be spoken out loud. There is space here for all of it.
LGBTQIA+ South Asians
Affirming care for queer and questioning individuals navigating family pressure, cultural stigma, identity, and the specific grief of not being able to bring your whole self home. You deserve to be fully seen.
Youth, Teens, and Cycle-Breakers
For young South Asians navigating academic pressure, identity, belonging, and the weight of being the first in their family to do anything differently. You are not too young to feel this much. And you are not alone.
First and Second-Generation Immigrants
Living between two cultural worlds where you are never quite enough for either one is its own specific kind of exhaustion. Therapy that understands this does not ask you to pick a side.
Multicultural Couples and Families
Cultural differences within a relationship or family system are not just communication problems. They are identity, loyalty, and belonging questions that deserve a clinical space that can hold that complexity.
“When I began therapy with JiVA, I did not realize how much of my pain was connected to my family’s past. The stories of struggle and survival I grew up hearing were not just history. They were alive in me, affecting my relationships and my sense of self. JiVA helped me see the connections and start untangling my own identity from the trauma of previous generations.”
Community member, JiVA therapy client
Shared with permission; identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.
Taking the first step is the hardest part. We make the rest simple.
1
Book a free 15-minute call
Tell us a little about what you are carrying. No commitment required. Ektha handles all intake calls personally.
2
Get matched and start
Based on your intake call, you will be matched with the right therapist. Sessions are weekly, available via telehealth or in person.
3
Need help covering the cost of therapy?
Complete our financial assistance form. Support may cover the full cost of therapy for people who qualify, subject to current program capacity.