Amichai Amar, PhD

Associate Psychotherapist

About Ami

Hello, my name is Amichai, or Ami as many people call me.

Is something in the way of experiencing your life fully? Maybe it is a challenging relationship with a loved one, a family member, someone at work, or even with yourself? This something might be longstanding; it might be new; it might be painful, overwhelming, unbearable – some of that or more than that. If you are looking for help, I want to help you. I love helping people help themselves.

You have your own inner truth and innate healing intelligence that you can sustainably access for support, direction, and taking action as life presents you with challenges. I can help you access or strengthen your relationship with this inner truth and healing intelligence.

Therapy with me is about you and me attending to your natural process, not applying procedure or technique prescriptively. It is a basic tenet of mine that you are the expert on how to live your life more fully because it is your life. To our therapeutic relationship, I bring an open, accepting, deep, and stable presence. I also bring professional knowledge and life experience that will help us explore what right relationship with yourself and the world around you feels like. I accompany and support you in all that we encounter on your journey.

I have made many changes in my life, and I can help you develop your own skills for navigating changes more gracefully. I come from a multicultural background, speaking four languages and having lived in four countries and three states. I have swam against cultural and societal norms, changed careers multiple times, healed from trauma incurred in abusive relationships, navigated various partnership dynamics, and, most importantly, I have changed the way I relate to myself and experience the world around me.

Reach out to schedule a free 20-minute consultation if you are interested in seeing if we would be a good fit.

Areas of Expertise

Who I work with 

  • Individuals, ages 20+

  • Couples

  • Families

What I can help with

  • Anxiety and depression

  • Complex / relational trauma and post-traumatic stress responses

  • Sex, intimacy, and relationship issues

  • Major life transitions in relationships and careers

  • Creative blocks

  • Low self-esteem, self-confidence, or self-worth

  • Improving communication skills

Therapy with me

I work deeply and take the approach that we are all whole, complete, and not broken human beings – we have a body and a spirit, and we have access to the wisdom of the life force within us. While most people separate the mind from the body, I acknowledge that the mind is a part of and within the body and that the therapeutic process requires a movement between thinking and bodily sensing. I believe that new meaning can be made of past experiences in order to change our experiencing of the present. For this, we have to be willing to put aside existing narratives, arrive at stillness, and attune to what comes freshly from the body.

Wholeness includes suffering, meaninglessness, isolation or aloneness, and death in addition to love, joy, companionship, choice, and freedom; all of that and more. Additionally, we are inherently relational beings, and even for those who choose to remain largely solitary, we are constantly and always in relationship, even with and within ourselves. Our struggles as well as the shifts that lead to their resolution occur in relationship.

The most powerful factor in therapy is not a technique, theory, or set of concepts. It is the relationship between us, within which you feel a safe and steady human presence willing to be with whatever comes up for you.

Many therapeutic modalities exist in the world of psychotherapy, and I work with those that embrace the whole person as they are in the here and now. Some call these modalities integral, others holistic, and I use the name experiential. I am a lifelong learner and continually educate and train myself in numerous modalities. The ones I currently use the most are:

  • Existential Humanistic / Existential Integrative Psychotherapy (EH/EI)

  • Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy (FOT)

  • Internal Family Systems (IFS)

  • Control-Mastery Theory (CMT)

  • Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy (PAP)