Psychotherapist, writer, and twenty years deep in the question of what love actually requires.
I’m Simone Writer, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in San Francisco specializing in couples therapy, relationship intensives, and individual psychotherapy for people navigating relational pain, major life transitions, and the often-disorienting work of becoming more fully themselves.
I work with thoughtful, high-functioning people who may look capable on the outside while feeling overwhelmed, lonely, split, or deeply uncertain inside. I also work with couples whose love has become organized around conflict, distance, betrayal, resentment, or patterns they can no longer solve on their own.
My work is relational, somatic, psychodynamic, attachment-informed, and rooted in a feminist understanding of how our inner lives are shaped not only by family history, but by culture, gender, power, caregiving, class, and the worlds we have had to survive.
I am interested in more than symptom relief. I want to understand what your suffering is trying to tell us, what old adaptations may no longer serve you, and what kind of life or relationship is trying to become possible.
What looks like a problem often began as protection
Many of the patterns we judge most harshly in ourselves began as intelligent adaptations.
Hypervigilance. Overfunctioning. Appeasing. Withdrawing. Controlling. Performing competence. Losing yourself inside relationships. Trying to anticipate everyone else’s needs before they become dangerous.
These strategies make sense in context.
But what once protected us can eventually become the very thing that keeps us disconnected from ourselves and from the people we love.
My work helps clients understand these adaptations without romanticizing them. We attend to the nervous system, attachment history, defenses, relational patterns, shame, power, culture, and the ways old survival strategies become embodied and enacted in present-day relationships.
Insight matters. But insight alone is rarely enough. Therapy becomes transformative when you can also experience something new in the body, in relationship, and in the choices you can make.
Couples therapy & relationship intensives
I work extensively with couples caught in painful relational patterns, including recurring conflict, emotional distance, betrayal, infidelity, resentment, unequal emotional labor, sexual disconnection, and uncertainty about whether the relationship can or should continue.
My couples work integrates Relational Life Therapy, attachment theory, somatic and experiential approaches, psychodynamic thinking, and attention to family-of-origin patterns, nervous-system states, power, gender socialization, and relational accountability.
I don’t assume every relationship problem is simply a symmetrical “dance.” Sometimes meaningful differences in responsibility, accommodation, entitlement, labor, or harm need to be named clearly. At the same time, my work is not about creating villains. It is about helping each person become more capable of telling the truth, taking responsibility, staying relational, and understanding the impact they have on the person they love.
Sometimes the work is about rebuilding.
Sometimes it is about grieving what has happened.
Sometimes it is about discovering whether two people are willing and able to create a different relationship together.
For couples who need more room than a standard weekly session allows, I also offer longer sessions and relationship intensives.
Individual therapy
My individual practice is especially suited to high-functioning adults navigating painful relationship patterns, anxious attachment, heartbreak, betrayal, grief, perfectionism, overfunctioning, self-abandonment, and major identity transitions.
Many of my clients have spent years being the capable one.
They know how to perform competence, take care of others, understand themselves intellectually, and keep moving, even when something inside them is exhausted, grieving, furious, or longing for another way to live.
Therapy offers another possibility: a place to become less organized around survival and more able to inhabit your own desires, limits, anger, tenderness, creativity, and authority.
My work is deeply informed by feminist psychology and by a critique of psychological language that treats suffering as purely individual when it is also relational, cultural, historical, and structural.
Where psychology meets the deeper life
My clinical work is grounded in relational, somatic, psychodynamic, and trauma-attuned psychotherapy, while also making room for dimensions of human experience that do not fit neatly into diagnostic categories: meaning, mystery, ritual, spiritual experience, altered states, grief, creativity, and the periods of life in which an old identity is dying before a new one has fully emerged.
I work with people who are not only asking how to feel better, but how to understand what their suffering is asking of them.
For some clients, psychotherapy includes questions of spirituality, existential meaning, cultural inheritance, or psychedelic preparation and integration. These dimensions are never imposed, but they are welcome in the room.
What it’s like to work with me
I’m warm, engaged, and direct. I ask questions, slow things down, and name what I notice rather than sitting silently while you circle the same problem. I also use humor when it fits. Therapy can be serious without being solemn, and sometimes a little laughter helps us see a pattern more clearly or hold something difficult with less shame.
I’m interested in the story you tell me, but also in what happens underneath it: what your body is communicating, where you protect yourself, what becomes difficult to say, and what happens between us in the room. I believe the therapeutic relationship can become one of the places where old relational patterns are not only understood, but experienced differently.
You can expect curiosity and compassion from me, but not endless agreement. Part of my work is helping you see what may be difficult to see from inside your own adaptations, while holding those adaptations with respect for why they developed in the first place.
With couples, I stay curious about both partners without assuming every conflict is symmetrical. I pay attention to impact, responsibility, accommodation, entitlement, power, and the ways each person’s protective strategies shape the relationship. My aim is for us to develop a clear picture of the pattern early enough that therapy has direction rather than becoming another place to rehearse the same fight.
I don’t hand out platitudes or generic communication tips. We may certainly learn new relational skills, but I want to understand why those skills become so difficult to access precisely when you need them most.
Education, training and professional background
I hold two master’s degrees from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco: an MA in Counseling Psychology and an MA in Women, Gender, Spirituality, and Social Justice. I also hold a BA in Political Economy from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
Before becoming a psychotherapist, I became an ICF Certified Integral Coach through New Ventures West and spent almost two decades working in professional and corporate coaching. That background still informs my ability to work with highly capable adults who want psychological depth without losing sight of meaningful change.
My clinical approach draws from relational and psychodynamic psychotherapy, feminist and relational-cultural psychology, attachment theory, somatic and trauma-sensitive approaches, Gestalt, parts and experiential work, and Relational Life Therapy.
I have also taught at CIIS and have spent many years involved in education and advocacy addressing domestic violence and violence against women.
Across these different settings, I have remained interested in the same fundamental question: how do people become more fully themselves without abandoning relationship, and how do relationships become places where people can remain fully themselves?
A bicultural lens
I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro and have lived in the United States for more than two decades.
Living between cultures has shaped the way I understand identity, belonging, family, intimacy, gender, migration, and the assumptions we inherit about who we are supposed to become.
I bring both Brazilian relational warmth and the rigor of my clinical training to the room, along with an enduring curiosity about how culture lives inside the psyche.
My own life has also included rupture, grief, reinvention, and healing. I do not believe therapists need to be blank screens or untouched by life in order to accompany others well. I believe our humanity matters when it is held with boundaries, humility, and responsibility.
Writing, teaching, & community work
Alongside psychotherapy, I have worked as a coach, teacher, facilitator, and educator in settings ranging from graduate education and corporate coaching to domestic violence organizations and community programs.
Writing is increasingly central to my work.
I am interested in the places where psychotherapy meets culture: love, attachment, patriarchy, trauma, spirituality, gender, grief, power, and the strange work of becoming a person who can belong to herself while remaining deeply connected to others.
Across therapy, teaching, and writing, I keep returning to a few questions:
What happened here?
What did you learn to do in order to survive it?
What is that adaptation costing you now?
And what becomes possible when you no longer have to organize your life around it?
Life beyond the therapy room
I live in San Francisco with my partner, surrounded by a community of people I love.
Outside the therapy room, I am usually reading, writing, dancing, practicing yoga, wandering the city, having unnecessarily long conversations over dinner, or acquiring yet another book I absolutely did not need.
I believe seriousness and aliveness belong together. So do depth and humor.
And I still believe in the power of a good question, a well-timed pause, and the truth spoken aloud.
Interested in working together?
I work with couples and individuals in person in San Francisco and online throughout California.
If you are looking for couples therapy, a relationship intensive, or individual psychotherapy, you can schedule a consultation to explore whether working together feels like the right fit.
Simone Elizabeth Writer, MA, LMFT #156781
1781 Union St., San Francisco, CA 94123
415.409.9359
Providing trauma-attuned couples intensives, depth, and somatic therapy in San Francisco, California