Bio Pic
Office
Counseling
Tel
(802) 443-5141
Email
ltjia@middlebury.edu

I was drawn to counseling work after spending nearly a decade as a sexuality educator, bearing witness to hundreds of people who shared stories of shame, longing, trauma and resilience. Sexuality education helped me get comfortable talking about sensitive topics like consent, shame, sexual and gender identity, BDSM, power dynamics, polyamory, and more. It also helped me develop a huge amount of empathy for the hidden struggles that many people go through around sexuality, relationships, shame and their emotions—often with little to no support.

I am currently a third-year graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in a program that mixes a social justice focus with spiritual perspectives on the sacred work of healing and development. I bring a collaborative, trauma-informed approach that seeks to deeply listen to and honor your experience, while helping you get in touch with your innate resources for healing and empowerment. My training and approaches are diverse and draw from Internal Family Systems, somatics, psychodynamics, humanistic, feminist, and relational approaches, but the mainstays are unconditional acceptance of you and a genuine desire to be with you in your experience, especially when things are hard. My identities as Chinese American, mixed-race, non-binary, femme and Queer also inform the critical consciousness that I bring to clinical work. I look forward to meeting you!