About Therapy with Me
A Bandaid over a Wound Nobody Cleaned
Some therapy works the way a bandaid works: it covers the thing over, the bleeding stops, and for a while the arrangement holds up well enough that you stop thinking about it. Nobody cleaned the wound out first, though, so it goes on festering quietly under the dressing, and the trouble shows up again later in a form you don’t recognize at first as the same trouble.
Most of the people who get in touch with me have had therapy before, sometimes several rounds of it, and what they describe is a version of that. It helped, it patched things up for a while, and it stayed at the surface level of the actual problem. They can name the pattern by now, and they can often trace where it started, and they still can’t stop living inside it, which is its own particular kind of tiredness, managing something for years rather than understanding it.
Where the Earlier Work Didn’t Go Deep Enough
My psychoanalytic training came later, because I kept running into the same wall across other approaches: they could quiet a symptom, but they couldn’t tell you why it was there. The gap is one of design. That kind of work is built to settle a symptom, which it often does well, and the question of where the symptom came from sits outside what it was ever meant to reach.
Getting underneath it means meeting often enough, over a long enough stretch, that the pattern stops being something you report on from a week’s distance and starts happening right there between the two of us, where we can both look at it while it’s live. That’s slower than covering it over, and it’s the only version I know of that treats the thing itself.
What the Hour Is For
Cleaning out something that has been covered over for years takes a particular kind of hour. It means fifty minutes, a pace nobody is hurrying along, and enough slack in the conversation that the thing you’d normally leave out, because it seems too small or too unflattering to say out loud, has somewhere to go.
Our time together is sacred.
I can take in what you expect to be too much for anyone, without flinching and without steering you back toward something easier. The conditions that make that possible get built deliberately, from the first phone call onward, in how carefully I time things and in how much I leave alone until you’re ready for it.
Much of this work goes where it’s uncomfortable, because that’s usually where the useful material lives: an old loyalty you’ve never questioned, the thing you do right before you go quiet, whatever is happening between the two of us at the moment you change the subject. Nothing here is ruled out for being taboo, and that includes race, money and class.
How Often, and for How Long
I have been in private practice in San Francisco for over ten years, and frequency does a great deal of the work. Some patients come once a week, others twice or three times, and for analytic work a few come as often as five. The couch is available if you want it, and it’s entirely optional.
Individuals and couples both come to me, and so do people preparing for a psychedelic experience or making sense of one afterwards. I don’t prescribe or administer any medicine, and my part is the conversation beforehand and the much longer one after, when what came up has to be worked out alongside everything else in a life.
About Julia Lehrman, LCSW
I enjoy being someone people feel comfortable being vulnerable with. I’m the person in a group who likes to listen, the one who asks the question that cracks something open. I didn’t set out to be a therapist. During difficult years growing up I often wished I had the right someone to talk to, and I wanted to become that person for others.
Beyond the clinical training, I’m also a certified yoga teacher, an eternal student of psychology and philosophy, and someone who believes the relationship between therapist and patient is one of the most powerful tools for change that exists, and often more powerful than any specific technique.
I work with people of all genders, backgrounds, and orientations, and especially welcome LGBTQ+ and BIPOC folks navigating identity, relationships, and belonging. The effects of discrimination, racism, and other forms of oppression on your life and your sense of self are welcome here too. A social justice orientation is part of how I understand people and their pain.
Training and Background
- Licensed Psychotherapist, California (LCSW), in private practice for over ten years
- Post-Seminar/Advanced-standing Candidate, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC): training completed, presenting final graduation paper Winter 2027
- Affiliate, Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology
- PhD Candidate, East-West Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)
- Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and Research (CPTR) Certificate, CIIS, 2019
- Mindfulness and Compassion Cultivation Training, Stanford University
- Graduate studies, New York University (highest honors), graduated 2012
- B.S., Journalism and Psychology, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (magna cum laude)
- Certified yoga teacher (RYT)
You Can Bring the Part That Was Never Treated
The first conversation is twenty minutes on the phone, free, and yours to use however you want. Tell me what keeps coming back, what you’ve already tried, and what the earlier work did and didn’t get to. If the slower kind of treatment is what you’re after, we can talk through what meeting often enough would actually involve, and I can usually start with new patients the same week or the week after.
Talk to Me First
That sentence you almost said is still waiting. It doesn’t need to arrive polished, and the dream doesn’t need to make sense yet. There will be a pause nobody hurries, and room for whatever you bring into it.
A free 20-minute consultation is the best way to find out whether this is the right fit. I can usually see new patients the same week or the week after. Bring the sentence with you.
Request Your Free 20-Minute Consultation- (415) 993-1301
- julia@
julialehrmantherapy.com - 1700 Pierce Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94115