Lifting the emotional burdens of psychic distress with the empathy, insight & attunement of a relational therapist in San Francisco.
A Threshold of Discontent: Meeting the Call for Clarity
Anxiety and Depression Therapy in San Francisco serving the Bay Area. Online therapy across California.
Who am I?
What happened to the person I used to be?
What am I even doing with my life?
When something essential within you is out of alignment — or when your life no longer reflects what matters most — it’s easy to feel anxious and depressed.
When symptoms of anxiety and depression prevent you from fully engaging in the world in ways that are productive, joyful and fluid, skillful therapy can ease your suffering.
Sometimes the emptiness shows up as a loss of direction, clarity, or connection to your inner truth. This existential angst betrays a very real sense that something is missing, even if you can’t quite name it.
You may feel emotionally flat despite your efforts to stay engaged, or strangely disconnected from the world around you. Friends may ask if you are depressed.
Other times, rapid heartbeat, racing thoughts, inability to sleep, irritability, impatience, headaches, tension in your jaw, or a weight on your chest betray a generalized anxiety that is your psyche’s attempt to warn, protect, and rally the system to action.
Anxiety and depression often signal more than imbalance. They reflect a deeper kind of disorientation: a sense of estrangement from yourself, from meaning, or from a life that once felt coherent.
You may find yourself filled with self-doubt, trapped in cycles of overthinking, or exhausted by the performance of being “fine.”
Depth-oriented therapy for anxiety and depression explores how your current suffering connects to earlier experiences, unconscious beliefs, and the strategies you’ve relied on to survive.
We’ll start in the present moment, address what’s happening now, and do some real world coping and problem solving.
Coping skills and self-soothing strategies are opportunities to downregulate your nervous system in moments of anxious escalation and upregulate your nervous system in times of depression or dissociation.
Then, through deep listening and thoughtful inquiry, we’ll go deeper — exploring how you got here and where you want to go.
Often showing up as absence and loss, depression is the “nothing” in “nothing’s wrong.”
You may feel down or low for no apparent reason. You may notice changes in the way you eat or sleep.
Fatigue is common. Some days it may be hard to get out of bed. Other days you may find yourself struggling to fall asleep even when you are otherwise exhausted.
You may feel unmotivated or hopeless, seeing life as a series of futile struggles. The smallest tasks can feel insurmountable, making it challenging to do the things that you know might help.
The idea of reaching out to friends or colleagues may make you want to hide. Perhaps you don’t want to be seen this way or feel you don’t have anything to offer.
You may notice you no longer experience pleasure in things that you once found engaging and enjoyable. You may indulge in negative self talk as you grieve the person you once were.
Untreated depression can lead to isolation, avoidance, and resistance to change, limiting the ways you interact in the world and truncating your potential for growth.
Before you decide you are broken beyond repair, please know that help is available. Even when it seems out of reach, change is possible. You don’t need to continue to suffer alone.
Chronic depressive states have a way of settling into the contours of your life in a way that takes over, making it hard to separate yourself from the depression or imagine life any other way.
Perhaps one day you overhear yourself telling someone “I am depressed” and realize you have come to identify with your condition.
When all your usual strategies are no longer working, it’s time to reach out. Therapy for depression can help.
While physically rooted in San Francisco, this work often extends beyond geography. Like the unseen roots of a tree reaching far beyond its canopy, depth-oriented psychotherapy often attracts people connected by a shared orientation toward meaning, complexity, and self-discovery. They may be analytical or intuitive, creative or systems-minded, intellectually curious or deeply empathic. Artists, engineers, physicians, entrepreneurs, scholars, or seekers, what unites them is less who they are than how they inquire. The clients who benefit most from therapy with me share an impulse to look beneath the surface of experience and a persistent curiosity about the deeper patterns shaping their lives, returning again and again to questions of meaning, relationship, identity, and becoming.
If you’re here, it’s likely because some part of you is ready for something different. That’s a meaningful threshold.
Low-grade malaise, discomfort, a loss of energy or motivation — or maybe, inner summons toward change calling from the edge of transformation, saying, “over here, this way.”
Join me in holding the possibility that what feels like anxiety or depression may also be a gateway for meaningful change.
Let’s also honor the parts of you that speak with reluctance, uncertainty, or fear, and thank them for protecting you.
Therapy for anxiety and depression starts with gentle curiosity.
What if anxiety and depression are symptoms, but not the whole story?
Together, we’ll make a commitment to listening closely to what your symptoms are trying to tell you, and discovering who you might become in the process.
When it feels right, reach out for a consultation.
For questions about how therapy works or what to expect, take a look at the Therapy FAQ.
In my San Francisco therapy practice, I offer a space to explore what’s causing you pain and what it means for your life.
Together, we’ll uncover the origins of your anxiety and depression — from unmetabolized grief, relational wounds, or the long-term impact of chronic stress from living in survival mode.
Depth therapy honors your symptoms as intelligent — and your longing for clarity as wise.
Feeling anxious or depressed doesn’t mean you’re broken or failing. Often it’s an indication that something is out of balance in your relationships or in your environment.
Many of the clients I work with are healing from traumatic experiences that were long ago dismissed, minimized, or quietly swallowed and now returning in the form of inexplicable bouts of nausea, tears, headaches, or sleepless nights.
As a depression and anxiety therapist, I can help you cope, but more importantly, I’ll help you heal from the source.
Within a strength-based framework, you’ll gradually learn to bring self-compassion and ease to the places that hurt.
Therapy for anxiety and depression is intentional work. Integrative in method and grounded in authentic relationship. My approach to your healing is shaped by your story and abilities and oriented toward change from the ground up.
Join me in holding the possibility that what feels like depression may also be a gateway for meaningful change.
Healing begins with connection.
Indications for Change
Anxiety and depression are symptoms common to a wide variety of problems in the realms of grief and loss, relationship challenges, addiction, and the lasting effects of psychic wounds. The discomfort that arises here has important messages for you. Together we listen closely as your inner wisdom guides you towards transformation.
Anxiety and depression often emerge first through the body: disrupted sleep, exhaustion, brain fog, weight changes, irritability, emotional numbness, difficulty concentrating, or a growing sense that life has lost coherence.
While depression is characterized by a loss of interest or pleasure in activities you normally enjoy, anxiety is distinguished by excessive worry.
Often cyclical, anxiety and depression are felt as energetic states that result from your body’s effort to restore balance by upregulating or downregulating your central nervous system in times of psycho-spiritual or relational difficulty.
While a healthy degree of anxiety serves to motivate and protect us from danger, when anxiety is overwhelming it can feel immobilizing. Anyone who has ever felt trapped in their body or in their life knows that anxiety can be a crippling affliction that creates a sense of paralysis, making it incredibly difficult to make choices or take action.
The counterpoint to states of tension and anxiety, depression is both insidious & pervasive, draining vibrant personalities of motivation, interest & pleasure until it becomes them.
People in chronic states of depression often feel that they have lost themselves, no longer seeing the distinction between who they are and how they feel.
As a therapist for anxiety and depression trained in body-based, somatic psychotherapy, I can help you create internal resources to self-soothe and regulate your emotional experience through mindfulness, breath, and the body. Listening to and befriending your body can help ease the stress and tension you’re carrying and ground in moments of dissociation, creating the safety needed to process difficult emotions and support a balanced nervous system.
Some of the types of anxiety I work with include Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety, Phobia, Anxious Attachment, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In our work together, I support you in finding a sense of calm, peace, and stability during periods of emotional overwhelm.
For clients living with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Dysthymia, or Dysphoria, my approach is compassionate and nonjudgmental, creating a safe space to explore painful feelings and the circumstances that contribute to them — even during the most challenging times.
Anxiety and Depression are often the first signs that something needs to be addressed in your life — valuable indications that some kind of change needs to happen.
By bringing mindful self awareness to your physical and psychological symptoms, therapy helps you get beneath the surface of your problems to address the root causes of distress.
Marla Leigh Caplan Psychotherapy San Francisco
For those seeking a gentle refuge for balance and calm amidst the chaos, a therapist for anxiety and depression can help you process latent emotions, stabilize moods swings and find relief from stress.
Part of what creates change in psychotherapy is a loving, supportive relationship where you can feel safe to explore those areas that you have repressed for fear of being judged or misunderstood.
If you’re looking for anxious attachment therapy in the Bay Area, a relational therapist can help you establish the safety and security needed to heal at the source.
Together, we will explore your fears and conditioning, the beliefs that shape your automatic responses, find new ways to self-soothe, and cope using skills that are in line with your personal strengths.
In the context of a supportive therapeutic relationship, you will begin to see yourself differently.
After some time, you may begin to notice that your habits have shifted and you feel different—the haze has lifted, you are finding ease in the things that once felt hard, taking enjoyment in simple pleasures, reconnecting and repairing relationships with your loved ones—you are flourishing.
I am here to help you see that all of this is possible. You don’t have to suffer endlessly and you don’t have to find your way through the dark alone.
As a therapist treating anxiety and depression for over a decade, I can help you:
Book an appointment or text Marla at 415-857-5560 to set up a consultation.
In person Anxiety and Depression Therapy in San Francisco.
Online Therapy for Anxiety and Depression in Marin County, the Bay Area, and across California.