The family you are raising
is also the one you were raised in.
What Brings Families Here
The shape of family pain shifts.
The weight underneath it doesn’t.
Two cultures negotiating the same household
Acculturation gap · First & second generation · Extended family
You raised your children in a country that was not the one that formed you. The values you carried here — about sacrifice, obligation, what a good child looks like — are not wrong. They are also not translating. Your children are fluent in a register you still translate. And the family on a video call from the other side of the world still has opinions. Leela holds this without asking you to simplify it first.
The parent the child has stopped speaking to
Disconnection · Adolescence · The door that closed
Not a dramatic rupture. Just the answers that got shorter, the dinners that grew quieter, the door that stays closed more often. You remember when it was different and cannot locate the moment it changed. This is not a failure of love. It is two people operating from incompatible maps — and that gap can be worked with before it becomes the whole story between you.
The parent catching themselves
Intergenerational patterns · What got handed down
You hear your own parent in your voice. A tone, a silence, a reaction that arrived faster than you could think. What was done to you — or left undone — came into this family with you. Not because you chose to bring it. Because nobody gave you a way to put it down first. This work is about interrupting what was passed to you before you understood you were carrying anything.
Two families becoming one
Second marriage · Blended family · Stepfamily
You found each other after the first family ended. You both brought children, parenting styles, household rules, loyalties, and histories that had nothing to do with each other. Now they share a kitchen table. Blended families don’t struggle because anyone is wrong. They struggle because there was no time to design a shared story before it had already started.
The family reorganized around one person’s pain
Mental health in the family system · Walking on eggshells
One family member’s mental health challenges have quietly become the household’s organizing principle. Everyone calibrates — who can say what, when, in which tone. The care is real. So is the cost to the people doing the calibrating. Leela Mental Health works with families who want to understand what that dynamic has done to each person inside it.
The family that lives outside the tidy frame
Intercultural · Biracial · Interfaith · Cross-cultural
You married across cultures, faiths, or backgrounds. The children exist in a hyphen — two heritages, two sets of grandparents, two definitions of what family asks of you. Or a relationship arrived in the family that nobody planned for, and everyone is still learning how to hold it. Leela works with families writing a story that has no existing template.
The Team
The people you’d be working with.
Moitreyee Chowdhury
Palo Alto, California
Moitreyee founded Leela because the practices available to South Asian and immigrant families in the Bay Area kept asking clients to explain their context before the work could begin. She trained in fine arts in Delhi, worked in stage design and puppetry in Germany, and has practiced clinical work with immigrant and multicultural families in California for over two decades. A published poet. Sessions with Moitreyee are available in English, Hindi, and Bengali.
Family Systems Narrative Therapy EMDR Trained CBT · DBT
South Asian Hindi · Bengali
Therapist Name
Palo Alto, California
I work with individuals and couples around life transitions, relationship stress, and the quiet pressure of holding high expectations — both your own and others’. I grew up between cultures and understand the unsaid parts of that experience.
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Languages: English · Tamil
Modalities: CBT · DBT · Narrative Therapy
Family Systems CBT · DBT
East Asian Families
Therapist Name
Palo Alto, California
We are growing carefully. Our next clinician will bring the same commitment to culturally-informed, evidence-based care that anchors everything at Leela. Are you a clinician? We would love to hear from you.
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Position open · South Asian cultural competence a plus
Family Systems Young Adults Life Transitions Supervised
“Every family carries a story that started before anyone in it was born. That’s usually where we begin.”
In person · Palo Alto | Telehealth · California
How We Work
We start with the history,
not the presenting problem.
Where we begin
Family Systems
Before we look at what is happening now, we want to understand what each person brought in. What they learned about anger, silence, loyalty, and need in the family they grew up in. Who carried the worry in that household. Who smoothed conflict before it surfaced. Who was allowed to struggle and who had to hold everything together. Most families come in describing the fight they keep having. We are interested in what is running underneath it — because that is usually where the real work is. Family Systems is the frame from which everything else at Leela begins.
Narrative Therapy
Integrated with cultural work
Every family is living inside a story — about what the family is for, who each person is allowed to be, what the migration cost and what it was worth. Some of that story was written before anyone currently in the family had a say in it. Narrative Therapy, as we draw on it, helps families examine that story with some distance: which parts are still serving everyone, which parts arrived without consent, and what a different chapter might look like. For South Asian, East Asian, and immigrant families, this is not abstract. The story of the family often spans generations and continents. We hold all of it.
CBT & DBT
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
We use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to look at the thought patterns generating the most friction — the assumptions each family member makes about what another person’s behavior means, the beliefs about obligation and loyalty that came from a different context and now cost more than they carry. DBT gives people practical tools for the moments when the conversation is hottest — when a parent is activated, when a teenager has shut down, when the same fight is happening again. Both are adapted to the cultural frame each family brings, not applied over it.
Who Comes to Leela
Family work at different points in the household’s story.
The immigrant family, one generation in
You sacrificed to give your children options you did not have. Some of those options are now the exact distance between you. Your child is becoming someone your own parents would not fully recognize — and someone you are still learning to know. Leela holds this particular grief, which is also a form of love, and which has no clean resolution — only the possibility of being held more consciously by everyone in the room.
The blended or stepfamily household
You chose each other. That choice brought your children into a family structure they did not choose. The loyalty binds are real — to biological parents, to former households, to the version of the family that existed before this one. Leela works with blended and stepfamilies in the years when the question is still open: what kind of family can we actually become?
The parent coming in alone
Not everyone arrives with the family. Sometimes the parent comes first — because the teenager won’t come, or because the partner doesn’t believe in therapy, or because something in the household hasn’t been named yet and you need somewhere to think. One person doing things differently changes the room for everyone else in it. That is enough to begin.
Some of what this family is holding arrived before any of you did.
Clients searching for a South Asian family therapist, East Asian family therapist, immigrant family counselor, or culturally informed parent counselor in the Bay Area often find Leela because they need someone who already understands the territory — not someone they have to spend months educating before the work can begin.
South Asian families
For South Asian families, the household often carries the weight of intergenerational expectation, extended family involvement, and the particular pressure of being the proof of someone else’s sacrifice. The obligation between parents and children runs deep — and so does the cost when it cannot be spoken. This is not background to the work at Leela. It is the work.
East Asian families
For East Asian families, silence in conflict is often not withdrawal — it is what you learned in a household where keeping harmony was the rule. Face matters. The gap between what is felt and what can be said is real, and it accumulates over years. Leela holds these dynamics without requiring anyone to justify or explain them first.
Intercultural & blended families
For intercultural, biracial, and blended families — where two or more cultural scripts are running simultaneously — the question of what the family’s story actually is may not yet have an answer. The children exist in a hyphen that neither side of the family fully holds. Leela works with families who are still in the middle of writing it.
Why Leela
What makes this practice
different.
Built with this territory in mind.
Leela Mental Health was founded with South Asian and immigrant family dynamics as a core frame — not an afterthought. Every clinician is hired with that same orientation in mind. That doesn’t mean any clinician already knows your family. Each family is its own story. It means this ground is not unfamiliar here, and you won’t spend the first sessions building that foundation from scratch.
Both levels — between people and within them — held together.
Most family conflict is not really about the topic on the table. It is about what each person brought in from before — what they learned about anger, silence, need, and loyalty in their own family. We hold both levels at once: what is happening between people now, and what each person was already carrying when they arrived. The two are always connected.
Language, where it matters.
For families where the most important things were said — or not said — in a language other than English, working in that language can change what becomes possible in the room. Sessions with Moitreyee Chowdhury are available in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Language availability varies by clinician. Let us know what you need when you reach out, and we will be honest about what is available.
Further Reading & Listening
If you want to go deeper
before the first session.
Hold On to Your Kids
Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Maté
On why children increasingly turn toward peers and away from parents — and what pulls the attachment back. Resonant for immigrant parents watching their children grow toward a world that does not always include them.
My Grandmother’s Hands
Resmaa Menakem
On how trauma lives in the body across generations — not only as memory but as physiology. Written from the context of racialized trauma in America; the somatic framework it offers travels across experiences of inherited pain.
So We’ve Been Told
Sahaj Kaur Kohli · Brown Girl Therapy
On what it means to live between cultures — bicultural identity, family dynamics, and the stories children of immigrants are handed before they have a say in them. Made specifically for and from the South Asian diaspora experience.
What people ask before reaching out.
Does the whole family need to come to family therapy?
What is the difference between parent counseling and family therapy?
Does Leela work with blended families and stepfamilies?
How does Leela approach South Asian and East Asian family dynamics?
What does the first session feel like?
What does family therapy cost, and does insurance cover it?
Does Leela offer family therapy by telehealth across California?
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 ➞
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Something in 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.