About Nilüfer.

A bit about me

I became a therapist because of the people who once made space for me — patient, curious, unhurried. I try to offer the same: a space where what’s heavy gets a little lighter, and where you don’t have to be anyone other than who you are.

Before this work, I spent years moving between countries and languages. I carry a lived understanding of what it means to exist between worlds — the parts of ourselves we leave at borders, the parts that come with us anyway, the way identity is never just individual but always shaped by where we came from and who we’ve been in relation to. I bring that attention to my clients.

My training

I came to this work through psychology and anthropology — I studied both at UC Irvine, a combination that has never quite left me. I think of people as meaning-making creatures, always embedded in something larger than themselves: families, histories, languages, the particular world they were handed at birth.

My graduate training at San Diego State University deepened that instinct. Systems thinking, attachment theory, the idea that we are never fully ourselves outside of our relationships — these became less like frameworks and more like things I simply believe. I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Associate (LMFTA) in Washington, supervised by a state-approved clinical supervisor.

In sessions I draw on EFT, EFIT, IFS, existential and narrative approaches. But I hold them lightly. Theories, to me, are useful ways of making meaning — not maps to follow. What actually moves people is rarely a technique. It’s the quality of presence in the room. Whether someone feels genuinely met. I’ve come to trust that something in us knows the difference.

So while I bring everything I’ve learned into the work, what I’m really trying to do is simpler than any of it: be here, pay attention, and not look away.

How I think about therapy

Therapy is not, to me, a tool you take out and use. It’s a relationship inside which something becomes possible. The problems that bring us to therapy are almost never purely individual — they live in families, in histories, in systems larger than ourselves. I try to hold all of that without losing sight of the specific, particular person in front of me.

I’m collaborative. I’ll tell you what I’m noticing and ask what you’re noticing. I won’t pretend to know what you need before you do. When I do have a hunch, I’ll offer it — gently — and we’ll look at it together. The work belongs to both of us.

A note on virtual therapy

My practice is entirely online. I find that for many people, meeting from their own space — their kitchen table, a quiet corner, a familiar chair — makes the work more accessible, not less. The intimacy of a good conversation doesn’t depend on a shared room. I’m licensed to work with clients anywhere in Washington State.

Outside the work

I live in San Francisco. I like to be outside — hiking, watching light, taking photographs. Some of those photographs are on this site. If one stays with you, tell me.

I have lived between cultures for most of my adult life. That experience is not separate from my work — it lives inside it. Knowing what it means to carry two worlds, to translate yourself, to belong fully to neither and partially to both: I think it makes me a more patient witness. Someone who knows that identity is rarely simple, and that home is something people rebuild, again and again, in small and often unnoticed ways.

My kitchen still holds a place for where I come from. Turkish coffee in the afternoon. Simit on the occasional Sunday. I find that the smallest rituals are often the most honest ones.