Background

Nitya Rajpal is a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) in California. She holds a Master of Science degree from Columbia University, School of Social Work in Advanced Clinical Social Work with a focus on Health, Mental Health and Disabilities. Through her professional roles and graduate school education, she has gained experience working with families, youth and children dealing with variety of health and mental health concerns, including substance use and abuse, life transitions, women issues, and chronic mental illness. She has worked for Monterey County Behavioral Health as a Psychiatric Social Worker, where she established radical acceptance, empathy, supportive listening, crisis intervention, and medication management skills that has been a crucial part of her practice and has played an integral role in her client’s success and progress.

Approach

Nitya’s treatment approach is rooted in person centered therapy, and she strongly views the client-therapist relationship as a team. Nitya aims to provide services by establishing collaborative relationships with all her clients that is cognizant of their strengths and treatment goals. Nitya is committed to providing the highest standards of care and believes that a client centered, culturally inclusive, and strength-based approach can have an incredible impact on the client’s sense of overall well-being, happiness, recovery, and health.

Being an Indian-born Asian female, Nitya understands some of the challenges that people from diverse cultural backgrounds may experience in their daily lives and relationships. She is a culturally sensitive therapist, which means she respects differences in cultural attitudes. In her therapeutic relationship with her clients, she aims to have a good understanding of her client’s background and beliefs related to race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, family roles and cultural expectations.  Having a more in-depth understanding of her client’s intersectional identity enables her to work with them more effectively, which also helps her clients feel more understood. Nitya’s treatment approach draws from evidence-based models and beyond, depending on her client’s individual needs. Her work draws predominantly from psychodynamic, CBT, DBT, ACT, Mindfulness, and humanistic therapies.

Ideal clients

For adult and adolescent therapy, she provides treatment that covers substance abuse and use, depression, anxiety, life transitions such as school/work-stress, motherhood, and conflicting cultural issues (inc. interracial and intercultural relationships). She is fluent in English and Hindi.