Tara Gilmaher (she/her)

LMFT: CA #121152, NV #4012-R
Accepting Clients

I support people who are different by birth or by choice, using nurturing, supportive, holistic, depth, creative, whole-person, NVC work.

Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in California

Services
  • Individual
  • Couples
  • Adolescent/Teen
  • Group

About My Clients

I offer consultations- if you continue, it will be billed as a 1st session; if you don't: no fee. If you feel like you’re different or unseen, then I may be the psychotherapist you’ve sought. I support outliers, people hungering for purpose, fulfillment, healthy-good and nurturing relationships instead of dissonance, exhaustion, and sacrifice. In relationships, within your self, and in your work life, you might've been aiming for one thing and discovered you're not where you need to be.

My Background and Approach

I use an emotional approach (called “following the affect”) that’s based on studies of human interactions and emerging neuroscience which supports an understanding that feelings frame reality and responses, that neuroplasticity means ‘neurons that fire together wire together,’ and that when someone is triggered, activated, or somehow ‘out of it,’ their brain is not able to effectively access executive cognitive functioning, in other words: “older” regions of the brain can ‘hijack’ a person’s functional processes (an example of this is Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Collapse). As a therapist, I support your brain to calm, integrate, and organize information, memories, and expectations in a different way. (Sometimes I use obvious methods, like Somatics, EMDR, NVC, and the Gottman Method.) I offer individual, couples’/ relationship therapy, or therapy and coaching as a parent to support or manage your gifted, different, difficult, step-, special-needs, different aged, or (a) new child/ren.

My Personal Beliefs and Interests

I approach both life and work in the belief that life is best lived integrated, guided by the concept of Kaizen. In sessions and in the world, my work reflects my commitments to inclusivity and social justice. I work as an antiracist, ally and activist in social and ecological justice. I am committed to decolonization-liberation, universal patient and human rights, integrating and listening to extraordinary-numinous experience, and compassionate approaches to suffering. I attempt to bring reflexivity in my sense of identity and into inhabiting my therapeutic work. I’m a neurodivergent cisgendered ‘tom boy’ female descendent of generations of European colonists (who perceived the world and other Peoples as dangerous threats to be dominated and destroyed); that is why I do my best to respect and cherish the teachings of the occupied native lands I was born to.

I offer online counseling in the following states:
I have experience with the following
  • Agnosticism
  • Atheism
  • Buddhism
  • Wicca/Paganism

At A Glance

  • Experience: 10 years of practice
  • Rate: $200 - 250/session

Reach out to Tara