YOUNGEUN KIM
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, CA LMFT 126294
I'm YoungEun Kim, a California Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist providing online therapy to adults throughout California in English and Korean.
I work with thoughtful, capable adults who have spent much of their lives caring for others while struggling to care for themselves. Many of the people I work with are the ones others depend on. They are responsible, empathetic, and deeply committed to the people they love.
From the outside, they often appear to be managing life well. Yet internally, they may feel anxious, overwhelmed, disconnected, lonely, or exhausted from carrying so much on their own. They may feel guilty when setting boundaries, struggle to ask for support, or worry that something bad will happen if they step back from their responsibilities.
I believe healing begins with understanding.
Rather than focusing only on symptoms, I look at the larger story: how your relationships, family roles, developmental experiences, culture, and life circumstances have shaped the way you relate to yourself and others today. Many of the patterns that create distress in adulthood—including people-pleasing, over-responsibility, difficulty setting boundaries, and chronic self-reliance—often began as ways of maintaining connection, creating safety, or adapting to challenging environments.
My goal is not to help you care less about others. My goal is to help you build relationships where caring for others no longer requires losing yourself.
I was born and raised in Korea and have lived, studied, and worked in both Korea and the United States. Living between cultures has given me a deep appreciation for the complexity of identity, belonging, and navigating different expectations.
I understand the challenges that can come with carrying multiple cultural worlds, languages, and roles at the same time. This perspective informs my work with adults navigating cross-cultural identities, immigrant family dynamics, and the tension between honoring family expectations and building lives that reflect their own needs and values.
My work is informed by attachment theory, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), trauma research, mindfulness, and family systems perspectives. I view people as whole human beings whose emotions, relationships, histories, bodies, and environments are deeply interconnected.
Outside of therapy, I remain curious about psychology, trauma, human development, culture, and the ways people make meaning of their lives. I'm especially interested in how we become more fully ourselves—not by trying harder or fixing what is wrong, but by understanding what we have been carrying and how it has shaped us.
Therapy offers an opportunity to better understand the patterns that have shaped your life and create new possibilities for how you relate to yourself and others. If this resonates with you, I welcome the opportunity to connect.
Dear Better Me provides online therapy throughout California and specializes in anxiety, people-pleasing, boundaries, attachment, parentification, and the experiences of adult children of immigrants.