Therapy for High Achievers, Executives and Founders
In person in Hermosa Beach, serving Los Angeles, and online anywhere in California.
For executives, founders and high-achieving professionals who are performing well and running on empty. We work on what drives the pressure, perfectionism and exhaustion underneath, using IFS, EMDR and psychodynamic therapy. Sessions in Hermosa Beach, Los Angeles by appointment, and online across California.
From the outside, it's going well. The title, the team, the house, the results. Inside, the bar keeps moving. Every win buys about a day of relief before the next thing needs you. Rest feels like falling behind, and the people closest to you get what's left at the end of the day.
You're not in crisis. You're functioning, leading, producing. But some part of you knows the way you're running isn't sustainable, and that working harder at it hasn't fixed it.
That's the pattern we work on.
You've built a life that works on paper. It just doesn't feel like enough.
Change tends to feel gradual but deeply integrated.Who is this for?
We work with executives, founders and entrepreneurs, physicians, attorneys, finance and tech professionals, and other people carrying a lot of responsibility. Many of them notice:
It's hard to stop, even when there's nothing urgent
Their sense of worth rises and falls with performance
A steady hum of anxiety they've learned to work around
Relationships and health keep getting pushed to "after this quarter"
An inner critic that sounds a lot like a demanding boss
We also see the partners who live alongside that pressure. If the distance is showing up at home, our couples therapy is built for exactly that.
“You’re the one people rely on. But there’s a cost to holding it all together.”For a deeper clinical resource on this topic, see our complete guide to executive burnout in high-achieving professionals.
The Hidden Cost of Achievement
The same drive that built your career often comes with a price that doesn't show up on a performance review: anxiety that never fully switches off, emotional fatigue, and a growing distance from what you actually want. High achievers are skilled at pushing through, so these costs tend to stay hidden until they're hard to ignore.
Perfectionism in high achievers
Perfectionism usually isn't a flaw. It's a system that once kept you safe, earned approval or got you ahead, and it still runs long after it stopped helping. The goal of therapy isn't to make you careless or less ambitious. It's to make the system flexible, so you can hold high standards without being run by them.
High-functioning depression often hides inside perfectionism. You keep performing, but the color drains out: less joy, more flatness, a sense of going through the motions. If that sounds familiar, it's worth taking seriously, even if everything looks fine from the outside.
When perfectionism starts to feel like depression
Burnout in high achievers
Burnout in high achievers rarely looks like collapse. It looks like still delivering while feeling depleted, detached and short on patience. If burnout is the main thing you're dealing with, start with our executive burnout therapy page and the Achievement Mirage Cycle™.
How We Work
We focus on the underlying drivers of your patterns, not just the surface experience.
Our approach integrates:
Internal Family Systems to understand the parts of you that push, strive, and maintain standards
EMDR to process underlying experiences that shape your current responses
Psychodynamic therapy to identify long-standing relational and identity patterns
In practice, this means:
Identifying what is driving the pressure behind your performance
Working directly with the parts of you that anticipate failure, exposure, or loss of control
Expanding your capacity to tolerate rest, uncertainty, and emotional experience
Developing a way of operating that is not dependent on constant pressure
This work is not about reducing ambition.It is about creating a more sustainable and flexible way to engage with it.
Why executives work with us
Our founder, Lisa Chen, LMFT, spent years in corporate finance and Wall Street trading and studied at Wharton and Harvard Business School before training as a therapist in EMDR, IFS and somatic approaches. She knows the environments our clients work in from the inside: the stakes, the hours, the identity that gets built around performance.
Lisa Chen & Associates is a group practice of licensed therapists and supervised associates, each listed with their California license number on our team page.
Frequently asked questions about therapy for high achievers and executives
Will therapy make me less driven?
No. The goal isn't to lower your standards or dull your ambition. It's to separate your drive from the fear and self-criticism that often fuel it, so you can keep performing without paying for it in anxiety, sleep and relationships.
Why do high achievers struggle with anxiety?
Many high achievers learned early that their worth depended on performance. That keeps the nervous system on alert, scanning for the next problem or mistake. It often helps you succeed, and it rarely lets you rest.
Is therapy confidential from my employer?
Yes. Therapy is confidential, and we're out of network, so nothing is billed to your employer's health plan unless you choose to submit a superbill yourself.
Do you work with founders and entrepreneurs?
Yes. Founders and entrepreneurs are a large part of our practice. We understand the pressure of carrying a company, the blurred line between identity and business, and what it does to sleep, health and relationships.
What type of therapy works best for high achievers?
Approaches that go beneath coping skills tend to work best. We use IFS to work with the driven and critical parts of you, EMDR to process the experiences behind "never enough," and psychodynamic therapy to understand long-standing patterns.
Can perfectionism be a sign of depression?
It can be. High-functioning depression often hides behind perfectionism: you keep performing while feeling flat, joyless or exhausted. If that sounds familiar, it's worth talking to a therapist, even if everything looks fine from the outside.
Where do you see clients, and how much does it cost?
We see clients in person in Hermosa Beach, in Los Angeles by appointment, and online anywhere in California. Sessions are $425 to $450 with Lisa Chen, LMFT, and $180 to $300 with our associate therapists. Every new client starts with a free 20-minute consultation.
Explore Other Issues We Treat
High achievers often experience overlapping challenges such as anxiety, burnout, depression, or relationship strain. You can explore the full range of concerns we support clients with on What We Treat
