Black and white portrait of Tina Aggarwal smiling at the camera, in a dark blouse with a gathered neckline, against a plain grey background — Tina Aggarwal, MS, MA, LMFT

About Tina

Who is your Therapist?

I'm Tina Aggarwal, MS, MA, LMFT—a therapist, trauma educator, clinical supervisor, and founder of Survive 2 Thrive Therapy.

I believe that who we are today makes sense in the context of what we've lived through—our childhoods, relationships, families, cultures, bodies, identities, and the experiences that shaped us.

Therapy, for me, is about understanding those connections with curiosity rather than judgment. It's about recognizing the ways you learned to survive, healing what continues to hurt, and creating greater freedom to choose how you want to live now.

My Journey

I didn't begin my career as a therapist.

I grew up in India and later found my way to Silicon Valley, earning a master's degree in Management Science from Stanford University and beginning my professional life in technology.

But I found myself increasingly drawn to understanding and helping people—how our early experiences shape us, how culture and relationships influence who we become, and what allows people to heal after adversity. This was motivated in part by my own adverse childhood experiences.

In 2010, I changed direction and pursued a master's degree in Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University in order to be able to practice as a licensed psychotherapist in California.

Since then, I've worked across community mental health, residential treatment, intensive outpatient programs, mental health technology, clinical leadership, private practice, and higher education. Along the way, I began leading clinical teams and training therapists in culturally responsive care and trauma-focussed healing modalities.

I founded Survive 2 Thrive Therapy in 2020 and have since shaped it into a practice centered on trauma, relationships and intimacy, as well as women’s reproductive and perinatal mental health—with particular depth in women from marginalized communities such as women of color, immigrant women as well as queer, trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people.

The Survive 2 Thrive Therapy Model

My approach is grounded in three interconnected principles: Trauma-Responsive Care, Gender-Responsive Care, and Culturally Responsive Care.

Together, they reflect something I believe deeply: we cannot understand someone's mental health without understanding the context of their life.

Trauma-Responsive Care

Rather than asking “What's wrong with you?” I begin with a different question:

“What happened to you—and what did you do in order to survive it?”

Many patterns we eventually want to change began as intelligent ways of adapting to difficult circumstances. Anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional disconnection, hypervigilance, or difficulty trusting may once have served an important purpose.

Trauma-responsive therapy helps us understand these patterns without shame or blame—and recognize when strategies that once protected you are now getting in the way of the life you want to live.

Gender-Responsive Care

Gender, sexuality, our relationships with our bodies, and the expectations placed upon us by the dominant culture can profoundly shape our mental health.

My practice centers women's mental health while warmly welcoming queer, trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive clients.

I bring particular sensitivity to the ways gender intersects with trauma, relationships and intimacy, sexuality, reproductive and perinatal mental health, body image, caregiving, identity, hormonal transitions, and experiences of discrimination or marginalization.

Culturally Responsive Care

None of us enters therapy without a culture.

Our families, race and ethnicity, immigration experiences, faith and spirituality, socioeconomic circumstances, communities, and intersecting identities all influence how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

I approach therapy with cultural curiosity and humility, while recognizing the very real impact that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, oppression, and marginalization can have on mental health.

Good therapy shouldn't require you to separate your emotional experience from the cultural and social realities of your life.

What to Expect from Working with me

Beyond Talk Therapy

Sometimes understanding the past isn't enough to change how it lives inside us.

Insight is an important part of therapy. But many people arrive in my practice already understanding why they struggle.

They know why they people-please. They understand where their anxiety comes from. They can trace their relationship patterns back to childhood.

And yet their body, emotions, or relationships continue to respond in the same ways.

This is where our work can move beyond traditional talk therapy.

Depending on your needs, I integrate Brainspotting, IFS-informed parts work, somatic and nervous-system-based approaches, and Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) alongside relational therapy.

These approaches allow us to work not only with the story of what happened, but with the deeper emotional, bodily, and protective patterns that may continue to carry it.

There is no single technique that works for everyone. The work is individualized and collaborative, and we use the approaches that make sense for you and where you are in your healing.

A framework of my own

The House of Healing

My work is also guided by a framework I've developed through years of working with trauma survivors and teaching other therapists about trauma: “The House of Healing”.

I think of our inner world as a house.

Some experiences are readily accessible to us—we can talk about them, understand them, and recognize how they influence our lives. Others may live much deeper, behind doors that our minds and nervous systems learned to keep closed because doing so once helped us survive.

Sometimes something happening in the present can suddenly bring us back into those older emotional experiences. Intellectually, we know we're here and now. But another part of us may feel as though the past is happening all over again.

The goal of healing isn't to tear down the house or erase what happened.

It's to develop enough safety, resources, and compassion to explore what we've had to keep hidden—while strengthening our capacity to remain grounded in the life we're living now.

The past remains part of your story. It just doesn't have to keep running your present.

Therapist · Educator · Supervisor

My work as a therapist is deeply connected to my work as an educator & supervisor.

Today, I teach graduate students as an Adjunct Senior Faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and have provided clinical supervision through Palo Alto University's eClinic and Meadows Behavioral Healthcare in the past. I also offer trauma consultation and education to therapists who want to deepen their clinical work.

Teaching keeps me engaged with evolving research in trauma, attachment, neurobiology, relationships, and healing—and continually brings me back to the question at the heart of my work:

What actually helps people heal?

Ready to Begin?

You don't need to know exactly where to start. You can browse the various options of working with me in the “Client” section. If you feel pulled to learn more about one of those offerings, feel free to reach out via email or phone. You can also book a complimentary 20-minute consultation here.

Book Your Free 20-Minute Consultation