Bhavna Bharvani

MA Clinical Counselling from California School of Professional Psychology, San Francisco

BA Psychology from Georgetown University, Washington DC

EFT Couples Therapy – Certification Track

Gottman Method Couples Therapy – Level 2 Certified

EMDR Basic Training – pursuing EMDRIA Certified Therapist status

Bhavna is a US-trained Licensed Professional Clinical Counsellor, registered with the California Board of Behavioural Sciences (LPCC 10182). She started out practicing in San Francisco, where she worked with individuals, couples, teenagers, and LGBTQIA+ folks with chronic and complex trauma. She worked across a range of settings including community mental health, schools, and residential substance use treatment centers.

Bhavna is passionate about collaborating with adolescents, adults, and couples of all ethnicities, sexual orientations, and gender expressions so that they can know themselves deeply and cultivate fulfilling, meaningful lives and relationships.

Couples: There is something undeniably powerful, and healing about being in a secure loving partnership. However, when our important relationships come under stress, they can be completely debilitating. Bhavna provides a safe space for couples to identify negative patterns of interaction, access and communicate their primary needs to each other, cultivate the intimacy they want in their relationships, and work through sexual issues. Bhavna is also polyamory and non-monogamy informed, and kink/BDSM aware. In addition, Bhavna also works with clients who wish to end relationships through an intentional breakup process.

Adults: Conscious and unconscious beliefs, assumptions, and relational patterns can hold people back from living the lives they envision. Bhavna is passionate about helping people move through “stuckness”, manage depression and anxiety, overcome self-doubt, deal with change, learn coping skills for stress, heal shame, shift their inner critical voice and befriend themselves, and develop greater awareness of their feelings, needs, and desires.

Teens: Bhavna helps teens cope with the challenges of adolescence, including the pressures that come with a 24/7 online presence, anxiety around school/exams/friends, depression, feelings of inadequacy, and addictions. Bhavna also provides coaching to teens to unlock their potential, motivation, and self-confidence, and helps bring them in alignment with their goals.

Bhavna’s style is collaborative, warm, relational, and non-judgmental. She believes that trust and connection with the therapist are essential components of successful therapy. Her goal is to provide culturally-sensitive, empathetic, and strength-based psychotherapy through an integrative approach. She is primarily client-centered and combines techniques from acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness principles, attachment theory, narrative therapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy and dialectical behavioural therapy to suit the unique needs of each individual client.

In addition to her therapeutic work, Bhavna works with Mind HK to reduce the stigma around mental health issues by developing and delivering training on Mental Health First Aid in workplaces. Prior to becoming a therapist, Bhavna worked in investment banking, television journalism, and market research. She has substantial experience relating to people from diverse backgrounds, having worked in Mumbai, New York, London, and San Francisco.