Esther S. Oh is a Therapist in San Francisco Offering Support for Anxiety, Depression, Stress, and More
Anxiety, burnout, and depression have a way of accumulating quietly. What starts as a difficult stretch at work or a period of relationship tension can become a pattern that affects how you function, how you see yourself, and how you engage with the people around you. The thoughts that fuel the pattern become harder to see clearly the longer you’ve been living inside them.
Psychotherapy creates a space outside of that — an unbiased perspective, someone who isn’t part of your life but is genuinely invested in helping you understand it. I work with individuals in San Francisco and throughout the Bay Area, helping people gain clarity on what’s driving their distress and build the practical tools to change it.
To schedule a free initial consultation, call or text me at (415) 841-3687, email hello@esthersoh.com, or reach out through the contact page.
What Psychotherapy Addresses
Psychotherapy focuses on identifying and changing the thoughts, beliefs, and behavioral patterns that create emotional and psychological distress. The work attends to both past and present — exploring how earlier experiences shape current functioning, and how to intervene in the patterns that have developed as a result.
Many of the people I work with are high-functioning — professionals, entrepreneurs, and people managing demanding careers and complex lives in San Francisco and the Bay Area — who are experiencing a gap between how their life looks from the outside and how it feels from the inside.
- Anxiety that runs beneath the surface.
- A sense of burnout that rest doesn’t fix.
- Depression that doesn’t have a clear cause.
- Relationship patterns that keep producing the same frustrations.
These are the kinds of challenges psychotherapy addresses directly.
What I Work With
I work with adults dealing with a range of concerns, with particular focus on:
- Anxiety — Generalized anxiety, social anxiety, performance anxiety, and the chronic low-level worry that many high-achieving people in demanding environments carry without recognizing as a clinical concern.
- Burnout — The exhaustion, disengagement, and loss of purpose that accumulates when the demands of work and life consistently exceed what the nervous system can sustain.
- Depression — From persistent low mood and loss of motivation to more significant depressive episodes, therapy addresses both the symptoms and the patterns driving them.
- Relationship Challenges — Communication difficulties, recurring conflict, attachment patterns, and the self-defeating behaviors that show up in romantic relationships, friendships, and family dynamics.
- Life Transitions — Career changes, moves, relationship shifts, and the identity questions that accompany major changes in direction or circumstance.
- Self-Esteem and Confidence — The beliefs people carry about themselves — their worth, their capability, their right to take up space — and how those beliefs affect every area of their lives.
These areas frequently intersect, and my approach addresses the connections between them rather than treating any one issue in isolation.
How I Work
My approach draws primarily from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and mindfulness-based practices — evidence-based methods with strong research support across anxiety, depression, and a range of other conditions.
CBT works by identifying the thought patterns creating distress — the catastrophizing, the all-or-nothing thinking, the negative beliefs about the self — and building more accurate and functional ways of interpreting and responding to situations. ACT takes a different but complementary angle: rather than challenging difficult thoughts directly, it builds the capacity to hold them without being controlled by them, and to act in alignment with values regardless of what the mind is producing in a given moment. Mindfulness practices develop the present-moment awareness that both approaches draw on.
In practice, sessions are collaborative. I’ll ask questions that open things up, challenge the thinking patterns that are keeping you stuck, and work with you to develop tools you can use outside the session — in the moments that matter most. You don’t have to arrive knowing exactly what you want to work on. Most people figure that out in the process.
About Me
I’m Esther Oh, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with a private practice based in San Francisco. I received my graduate degree from New York University and have spent over a decade working with adults navigating anxiety, burnout, depression, relationship challenges, and major life transitions.
Working Together
I see clients in person at my San Francisco office and via telehealth throughout California. As a therapist licensed in both California and New York, I also offer interstate telehealth for clients in New York. For those who prefer a less traditional setting, I offer walk and talk therapy in the San Francisco area — sessions that combine movement and conversation in a way many clients find both grounding and productive.
I’m also an approved provider for Lyra Health and Modern Health, which allows employees of select companies to access psychotherapy sessions at no cost through their workplace benefits. If your employer offers either of these programs, you may be eligible for covered sessions.
Sessions are 50 minutes and scheduled weekly. Fees are $260 per psychotherapy session, consistent with market rate for San Francisco therapy services.
If you’re ready to get started or want to learn more about whether my approach is a good fit for what you’re dealing with, call or text (415) 841-3687, email hello@esthersoh.com, or schedule a free consultation through the contact page.