Meet Dania Uritskiy, LICSW: psychotherapist in the Seattle area

Welcome!

I am a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW) with over ten years of experience providing therapy to individuals and couples. I earned my Bachelor of Social Work from The Catholic University of America and my Master of Social Work from the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

I approach therapy with curiosity, warmth, and a grounded presence. My goal is to create a space where you feel comfortable exploring challenges, gaining insight, and building a deeper understanding of yourself and your relationships.

Outside of therapy, I enjoy spending time in nature, cooking, staying active, and connecting with family and animals. I am honored to be part of my clients' journeys and strive to provide a supportive, thoughtful, and genuine therapeutic relationship.

Dania Uritskiy, LICSW

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View my calendar for availibility

Training and how I work

My approach is relational, attachment-based, and trauma-informed, and in practice that comes down to three things I want you to be able to count on.

The first is that I believe patterns come from somewhere, so I'll ask about your family. What was said and what wasn't, who managed whose feelings, and what you had to become in order to be okay. I'm not looking to your childhood to explain everything, but the way you're coping now was learned somewhere along the way, and understanding where you learned it tends to change what we can do about it.

The second is that the relationship between us is part of the treatment, not a preamble to it. Much of what people bring me is relational at its root: not being able to be seen, not being able to need anything, not being able to stop performing. Those things rarely resolve through insight alone. They shift inside a relationship that stays steady while you test, over time, whether it actually will.

The third is that I'll tell you what I think, because warmth and vagueness are not the same thing. When I notice something, I'll name it. When something practical would help (language for a boundary, a way to interrupt a spiral, something to hold onto at 3am) we'll build it together, and I'll be straight with you about what I don't know and about whether I'm genuinely the right fit for you.

I'm also comfortable sitting with the parts of this work that other rooms tend to treat as too complicated: family obligation that doesn't map neatly onto American individualism, race and code-switching, grief that nobody has given you permission to feel, intrusive thoughts you haven't said out loud to anyone, and the anger that so often sits just underneath the guilt.

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Introduction in English:

Introduction in Spanish:

Have questions? Get in touch for a free consultation

Credentials and training

  • Licensure. Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW) in Washington State, license number LW61143567.

  • Education. Master of Social Work, University of Maryland, Baltimore, 2017, with Advanced Standing in Behavioral Health; Bachelor of Social Work, The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, 2014.

  • Clinical approach. Relational, attachment-based, and trauma-informed, with formal training in Motivational Interviewing, relational and psychodynamic therapy, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

  • Experience. More than ten years in practice, across community mental health, substance-use recovery, and group and private practice, before founding Vida Counseling & Wellness in 2024.

  • Clinical supervision. Washington State approved supervisor for associate-level social workers and counselors working toward independent licensure, see clinical supervision.

  • Languages. English and Spanish, both fluent and used in session; conversational French.

A bit more about me and my background

A tall latin beige church with orange accents and arched windows, topped with a small dome and cross, under a clear blue-green sky, with a street lamp and street banners in the foreground.

  • I was born in Maryland to parents from El Salvador, and I spent part of my early childhood there. Spanish was the language of our house. English was the language of school, and later of most of my working life, and for a long time I didn't think of that as anything unusual.

    I understand it better now. Children of immigrants learn early which version of themselves goes into which room, what gets said at home and what gets said at school. I didn't have words for that as a kid, and plenty of the people I work with don't either when they first come in.

  • I went to The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, on a scholarship, and finished my Bachelor of Social Work in 2014. Being a scholarship student makes you notice what things cost, and who around you never has to think about it.

    My first job out of school was as a case manager with Housing Counseling Services in DC, in a program for veterans who were homeless or about to be. Over that year I helped more than fifty of them into stable housing, through intensive case management and counseling and more phone calls to community agencies than I could count.

    What stayed with me was what came after the keys. Getting someone housed solves the crisis, and the months afterward can be harder than anyone expects. The adrenaline wears off, the daily structure of survival goes away, and whatever the crisis was covering for is suddenly in the room. I still think about that when someone tells me they should feel better by now, since the hard part is over.

    From there I moved to the Community Action Council of Howard County in Columbia, Maryland, as a community worker. I proposed the agency's Rental Assistance Program and then built it, and I spent much of my time counseling families in financial crisis about what stood between them and a stable place to live. Money trouble tends to arrive with shame attached, and with old family rules about who is allowed to ask for help.

  • In 2016 I started my Master of Social Work at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, in the Advanced Standing program in Behavioral Health. That same year I began as a therapist intern at Baltimore City Community College. When I graduated in 2017 I stayed on as a therapist, and I was there until 2021.

    Those five years shaped me more than anything else. The student body was diverse and urban, and many of my clients were doing college on top of a full life, working and raising children, often as the first in their family to try. I ran support groups and psychoeducation presentations, and I learned to fit the work to what each student was actually trying to get through that semester.

    The biggest lesson was telling apart stress that comes from circumstances and stress that comes from inside. A student who's anxious because rent is due and the car just broke down may need help with the car first. The therapy can wait a week. I still try to sort out which is which early on, because they call for different things.

  • After moving to Seattle I joined Eleanor Health as a clinical lead, and later joined Self Space, a Seattle group practice, where I was a clinician and team lead for three years. While there, I also ran the internship program and supervised the intern cohort.

    New clinicians are often the most conscientious people in the building, and the perfectionism that carried them through graduate school can make them freeze in session, afraid of saying the wrong thing. Watching interns loosen up and get better for it taught me a good deal about the high achievers I see now. Today I'm a Washington State approved supervisor, and I offer clinical supervision to associate clinicians working toward their license.

  • In 2024 I opened Vida Counseling & Wellness, and my office is now in Edmonds. Vida means life, and I chose it over something more clinical on purpose.

    Most of the people I work with aren't trying to fix a malfunction. They want their life back, the version where they sleep through the night and being loved doesn't depend on being useful first. That deserved a name that said so. It's also in Spanish, because half of my practice is.

  • People sometimes ask, since Uritskiy isn't the most Latina-sounding name. It's my husband's. He emigrated from Russia, so our household holds three cultures - American, Latin, and Russian!

    I keep my own marriage mostly out of my work, but it taught me what intercultural couples are up against: two families with different ideas about money and about how close is close, and someone always translating between in-laws, sometimes literally. When I see intercultural couples, I'm not learning that from a book. I've written more about it in love across cultures.

FAQ:

  • Please see my pricing page to see my most up-to-date rates.

  • I am an out-of-network provider with all insurances, however many of my clients reimburse their therapy sessions through their insurance with superbills. My fees page describes this process in detail.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • All three can provide therapy. An LICSW is a clinical social worker with a master's degree who is licensed for independent practice, which in Washington means I can assess, diagnose and treat without anyone else signing off. Psychologists hold a doctorate and are the people to see for formal psychological testing. Licensed mental health counselors have master's-level training much like mine, from a counseling program rather than a social work one.

    None of us prescribe medication. In practice, the fit between you and the person matters far more than the letters after their name. Social work training does push us to look at everything around a person, from family to money to culture, and you can see that in where I started.

  • Yes. Plenty of the people I see aren't Latino, and many didn't grow up between two cultures at all.

    What being Latina gives me is a habit of asking what something means in your family before I decide what it means in general. That helps whether your family is from Mexico or Spokane.

  • Washington's Department of Health has a public provider credential search online. You can look me up by name or by the license number in my credentials above. It shows whether a license is active and whether there has been any disciplinary action.

  • Tell me, ideally a few sessions before you want to stop. Ending on purpose gives us time to look back at what changed and to say goodbye properly, which a lot of people have rarely gotten to do with anyone.

    Some people taper to every other week first. Others come back for a few sessions a year or two later, when life shifts. Both are normal.

  • Whatever would tell you whether you could be honest with me. Some people ask how I'd approach their particular problem; others ask what I'd do if they disagreed with me. Ask the thing you're slightly embarrassed to ask, too. How I respond to that is useful information.

    The consult is free, 15 minutes for individual therapy and 20 for couples, and you can schedule it here.