Anyella Clark Psychotherapy LMFT #43180

Perhaps I should say my schooling in psychology started when as a little child back in Brazil. My mother was a psychologist and psychoanalyst and many of her peers frequented our house as I was growing up. I remember many spirited get togethers where the human condition was vividly debated.

My career in psychology started in 1994 working at La Casa de Las Madres, a shelter for battered women in San Francisco. There I counseled women and guided them in the process of rebuilding their lives after the separation from their abusive partners.

After La Casa, I spent the next few years as a counselor at multiple psychiatric residential programs helping patients transition from the hospital back to independent life.

In 2000, I finished graduate school in clinical psychology at SFSU and was very lucky to get a job at the Infant-Parent Program (IPP) at UCSF, where my education and interest for early childhood mental health started. At IPP I learned about the importance of early childhood mental health and its impact on the rest of a person’s psychological development. There, I worked at several pre-schools as a Mental Health Consultant and as a Child-Parent psychotherapist. After almost 3 years at IPP, I went to work at another early childhood program at UCSF, the Child Trauma Research Project (CTRP), with Dr. Alicia Lieberman, a leading Trauma researcher in the US. At CTRP I was introduced to Bowlby’s Attachment Theory, and truly fell in love with Attachment based early childhood interventions. There I did research on the effects of Trauma on children and more child-parent psychotherapy. One of my roles at CTRP was to write evaluations and recommendations for the Family judges at the California Supreme Court of San Francisco.

In 2005, I was back doing Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation and Child-Parent psychotherapy for several pre-schools around the Peninsula, in a Partnership between IPP and the Jewish Family and Children’s Services. There I remained on and off (I took a year off to be with my first baby, and moved back to Brazil between 2010 and 2012) until 2014. Since then I have done some private Practice work, but have mostly stayed home to raise my 2 young kids.

In 2017 I opened my private practice.