Meet Dania Uritskiy, LICSW: psychotherapist in the Seattle area

• Anxiety, overthinking, chronic stress — anxiety therapy

• Professionals, burnout, perfectionism, senior leaders — therapy for professionals

• Immigrants, first- and second-generation adults, intercultural couples — bilingual and bicultural therapy · terapia en español

• Pregnancy, postpartum, and perinatal loss — perinatal therapy

• Associate-level clinicians seeking supervision — clinical supervision

A first session runs fifty minutes, and you don't need to arrive with a coherent account of your life. Most people start somewhere in the middle of the story, and we work outward together from there.

I'll ask what brought you in now, because the now tends to matter more than people expect. We'll talk about what you'd want to be different. Toward the end, I'll tell you what I'm noticing and what I think the work would involve, and you'll leave with a real sense of whether you want to come back. If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so and point you toward someone who is.

Being clear about this saves everyone time.

I don't prescribe medication, since I'm not a prescriber. If medication seems worth considering, I'll say so and coordinate with your primary care provider or a psychiatric prescriber, and plenty of my clients do both.

I don't do court-ordered evaluations, custody assessments, disability paperwork, or any forensic work. That's a different job, with a different relationship to the client, and doing it well is incompatible with doing therapy well.

I don't take on active substance dependence as a primary focus, or eating disorders that require medical monitoring. Both deserve specialized care, and I'd rather refer you toward it than half-treat it.

And I don't offer 24-hour crisis coverage. If you need someone at 2am, that's what 988 is for. And if it's relevant to you, we'll talk about a safety plan early on.

The honest answer is that it depends on what you're bringing, and I'd rather give you a real estimate after a few sessions than put a number on a website.

A few rough patterns hold, though. A specific, contained problem (sleep, panic, one relationship decision) often moves within three to four months. Something older and more structural, like how you learned to feel worth something or decades of managing everyone else's feelings, usually takes a year or more, and people generally start to feel meaningfully better well before the work is finished.

Weekly is the default, and it matters more than most people expect. Every other week can work for maintenance, but it's slow going for active work, because so much of the progress lives in the continuity from one week to the next.

Vida means life, and the name was a deliberate choice over something more clinical.

Most of the people I work with aren't trying to fix a malfunction. They're trying to get their life back, the version of it where they sleep, where they aren't performing, where being loved doesn't require being useful first. That's a different project from symptom management, and it deserved a name that said as much.

It's also in Spanish, because half of my practice is.

Tell me about it in the first session. It's useful information rather than an awkward disclosure.

People arrive having been handed worksheets when what they needed was a relationship, or advice that assumed a family structure they don't have, or a therapist who went quiet whenever race or religion or family obligation came up. Some have sat with someone warm and pleasant for two years while nothing changed.

Knowing which of those happened tells me what to do differently, and it tells me what you'll reasonably be watching me for. It also means you're allowed to say "this isn't working" to me directly. That's a normal conversation between us, not a rejection.

Soon! Our therapy dog Peanut is currently in training and will start joining therapy sessions in 2028!