LGBTQ+ affirming therapy in Palo Alto, for a life that holds more than one culture and more than one truth about who you are.
What Brings People Here
Culture and identity,
carried in the same hand.
Leela Mental Health offers LGBTQ+ affirming therapy in Palo Alto for clients across the full range of sexual orientations and gender identities, including those whose families carry South Asian, East Asian, Latine, Middle Eastern, and other immigrant or diasporic histories. Being LGBTQ+ inside one of these families asks different things of you at different times. Six patterns come up often in this work. Some will sound like your life, and some won’t.
Coming out into a language that may not have the words
IDENTITY · LANGUAGE
Some families have a word for who you are. Some do not, and the closest translation lands wrong, or lands as an accusation. Some clients come out more than once: once in English, once in a mother tongue, once in the specific vocabulary a parent or grandparent will actually understand.
Two kinds of belonging that are asked to compete
FAMILY · COMMUNITY
The community that shares your culture and the community that shares your identity are often two different rooms. Some clients feel most at ease in queer spaces that do not know their culture, and most understood in cultural spaces that do not know this part of them. Very few rooms hold both at once.
A family that loves you and is still working out what it heard
FAMILY SYSTEMS · DISCLOSURE
Coming out to an immigrant or diasporic family is rarely one conversation. A parent’s fear for you and a parent’s rejection of you can look alike from across the room, and it takes time to tell them apart. Therapy holds space for both what you need to say and what a family may need time to understand.
Faith, culture, and identity, living in the same life
FAITH · IDENTITY
For many clients, faith or cultural tradition and LGBTQ+ identity are simply both true at once, sometimes on the same day. Leela works with your whole life, faith included, rather than asking you to choose.
Being asked to represent something you did not sign up for
IDENTITY · BELONGING
The only LGBTQ+ person in the family. The only immigrant kid in the friend group. Being asked to speak for an entire community, in either direction, when what you actually want is to be one specific person.
Building a life, and a family, on your own terms
CHOSEN FAMILY · RELATIONSHIPS
Partnership, marriage, parenting, and the shape of a household are open questions for many LGBTQ+ clients, especially where cultural or family expectation points one way and a client’s own life points another. Some clients are building chosen family alongside, or instead of, family of origin.
The Team
The people you’d be working with.
Moitreyee Chowdhury
LMFT 121934 · LPCC 9238 · EMDR Trained
Couples · Individual · Family · Trauma
Moitreyee started Leela after years of watching South Asian and immigrant couples get asked to explain themselves before anyone actually listened. Her couples work draws on CBT, DBT, Family Systems, and trauma-focused approaches, but it always begins with what each person walked in already carrying. She studied fine arts in Delhi, built and fabricated puppets for stage productions in Germany, and has practiced in California for over two decades. She is also a published poet. Sessions in English, Hindi, and Bengali.
Neeraja Muthal
AMFT 144185 Supervised by Moitreyee
Couples · Individual · Family · Trauma
I am an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist. Before becoming a therapist, I spent many years as a computer engineer but felt drawn to a more human-centered profession. That led me to earn my Master's in Counseling Psychology from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. I have experience working with adults navigating anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, work-related stress, couple conflicts, parenting challenges, and major life transitions. My approach is collaborative and integrative, drawing from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), psychodynamic, client-centered, solution-focused, and relational approaches.
Teresa Gamez DePerez
LMFT 152063 · Spanish · Family · Trauma · Couples · Individual
Teresa Gamez is a trauma-informed mental health therapist who provides compassionate, culturally responsive therapy for adults and couples in California. She supports clients navigating trauma, anxiety, depression, relationship challenges, grief and loss, difficult life transitions, and recurring family or generational patterns. Her approach focuses on creating a safe, nonjudgmental space where clients can better understand themselves, develop healthier coping strategies, strengthen relationships, and build emotional resilience. She provides therapy in both English and Spanish.
Here, you get to bring your culture, whether South Asian, East Asian, or Latine, into the same room as this part of who you are.
Clinical Methods
Evidence-based approaches,
chosen for the person actually in front of us
CBT
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
CBT looks at the relationship between what you are thinking and what follows from it. Where anticipatory worry about a family’s reaction, or a running commentary about not being enough in one direction or too much in another, is part of the picture, CBT makes that loop visible enough to work with.
DBT
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
DBT offers usable skills for moments when a feeling is too large to think through. It is also useful for holding two loyalties at once: to a culture and to yourself, or to a family and to a partner they have not fully met.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
EMDR is for difficulty with a history behind it: a coming out that went badly, a period of estrangement, discrimination at school, at work, or within a cultural community, or an earlier attempt at therapy that asked you to minimize part of who you are. EMDR is offered by clinicians at Leela who are EMDR trained, including founder Moitreyee Chowdhury.
Family Systems
Family Systems Work
For many LGBTQ+ clients the work is not only individual. It includes a family structure, often multigenerational, with its own unspoken rules about identity, marriage, and what is said outside the home versus inside it. This work makes those structures visible without turning it into a case against the family. What you keep, what you tell them, and when, is yours to decide.
Who Comes to Leela
Different roles
different questions.
Individuals figuring out how it all fits together
Couples building a relationship across culture and expectation
Parents and family members finding their footing
Why Leela
A starting point built with care, not a finished answer.
Cultural humility, applied to identity as well as heritage.
LGBTQ+ covers a wide range of identities, and South Asian, East Asian, and Latine cover an even wider range of countries, languages, and family histories. What Leela offers is a starting point where the basics will not need defining. Your family and your identity, we still ask about, and we will not assume yours resembles the last client who sat here.
Clinically rigorous methods: CBT, DBT, EMDR, Family Systems.
Each is chosen for the specific pattern you are carrying rather than handed out as a standard package. Work with LGBTQ+ clients from immigrant and diasporic families often moves between them, because identity, family structure, and belonging do not respond to the same tools.
An affirming standard, stated plainly.
Leela Mental Health does not provide, and does not refer clients to, any therapy aimed at changing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. California law prohibits this practice for minors, and it falls outside professional ethical standards for clients of any age. Names, pronouns, and a client’s own account of their identity are followed as a matter of course.
Sessions in English, and honesty about what else is available.
Sessions at Leela are currently offered in English, and with the founder in Hindi and Bengali. If another language matters to you, tell us when you reach out and we will tell you plainly what is available now rather than what we hope will be available later.
What people ask before reaching out.
Do you offer LGBTQ+ affirming therapy in Palo Alto?
Is Leela affirming for transgender and non-binary clients?
Does Leela provide conversion therapy, or try to change someone's identity?
I am not out to my family. Will you tell them anything?
My culture and my identity feel like they are in conflict. Can therapy help with that without asking me to choose?
Do you work with LGBTQ+ clients from South Asian, East Asian, or Latine families specifically, or LGBTQ+ clients generally?
Do you offer therapy for parents, siblings, or partners trying to understand a family member's identity?
Do you offer telehealth therapy for LGBTQ+ clients across California?
What does therapy cost, and does insurance cover it?
Related Services
Couples Therapy
For partners building a shared life across culture, family, and expectation.
Parent & Family Therapy
For families learning to talk across a gap that no one in the room created.
Trauma & EMDR
For experiences the nervous system has not finished with, including rejection and discrimination.
South Asian Therapy
For South Asian clients navigating family, culture, and identity together.
Good Faith Estimate: If you are paying out of pocket or not using insurance, you have the right to a written Good Faith Estimate before your first session. Read the full notice ➞
Some of this has been waiting for a room
where it can be said plainly.
When you are ready, this is where to begin.
We respond within 48 hours.