Leyla Aylin Kuntsal
Snap Shot of My Professional Background
2+ Decades Immersed In this Field
Including formally practicing psychotherapy, alongside graduate education in holistic counseling psychology, as well as study, training, and extensive personal work across psychological, relational, and contemplative traditions.
The Heart of my Work Today
A decade working with therapists, healing professionals, and highly self-aware, relationally oriented people around the patterns and developmental territory at the heart of my work today.
My Studies
Years of advanced training and intensive mentorship with therapists and teachers in the psychotherapy field, alongside extensive study spanning depth/Jungian, psychodynamic and transpersonal psychologies, Buddhist psychology, somatic perspectives, couples and relational approaches such as Intimacy From the Inside Out, Gottman Institute and EFT, differentiation theory, parts work et al.
Public work + Leaving Psychotherapy
Previously, I wrote publicly about psychology, relationships, spirituality, and inner work, co-building an online community of nearly 200,000 before stepping away from that as well as the psychotherapy path, during a period that fundamentally changed my work, direction, and way of being.
(The Above Barely Covers It)
My Personal Path
I’ve spent decades immersed in therapy and inner work, beginning after a brain hemorrhage at 16 and continuing because I found the work profound and helpful.
But after time, I saw how some of what I’d learned as healing or healthy could also reinforce and intensify my unhelpful patterns: over-functioning, self-awareness as defense, perceptiveness as shield, communication as a way to manage outcomes, spiritual inclinations as ways to avoid my own center and choice.
And being in community with many therapists and seekers, and having many clients who turned out to be therapists themselves, I began to see similar dynamics.
Things began to shift for me when, through a practitioner I worked with who had worked for decades on her own differentiation, I encountered a fundamentally different way of being—more centered, free, and okay, with a simplicity, cleanness, and naturalness I hadn’t experienced before.
We wrestled—a lot—with warmth, humor, and frustration. She saw through my sophistication in ways that were confronting and loving. Actually living from that different stance was frustratingly difficult, and can still be. It required a whole paradigm shift. And its liberation continues to surprise me with each inroad I make.
That slowly but dramatically shifted my internal structure and stance, allowing me to face more boldly and hold with more warmth one difficult reality after another: a life marked by loss, repeated limitation, chronic pain and chronic illness. My life couldn’t coast on anything but a deep, intimate encounter with reality. And all the work I’d done prior changed me in important ways, but couldn’t hold the immensity of the life I’d been tasked with.
In some ways, that life has tasked me with finding out what does. Not only in the big ways we tend to think about meeting life, but at the most granular level: the subtle, easily missed places in everyday life and relationships where we either build our own center, or unintentionally build things around it.
I’ve found it to be more challenging, confronting work, but so simplifying and connective. My relationships and life dramatically changed and continue to.
My Professional Path
I had nearly completed the 3,000 hours required for MFT licensure in California when another period of debilitating illness took me away from that path—compounded, in part, by the strain of years of largely unpaid clinical work and trying to work multiple jobs to stay afloat.
During the years that followed, I began working with people in a different capacity, while writing, facilitating groups, and continuing my training and mentorship in the field. My public writing helped grow an online community of nearly 200,000.
It was during this time that I began seeing coaching clients, most of whom sought me out happened to be either therapists or in the healing or helping professions or spiritually and psychologically sophisticated folks.During this time, I also began to question some of what I had learned and participated in across therapy, healing, and spirituality.
Eventually, I stepped away from public work. What followed changed my work, direction, and way of being, and became the ground for the work I do today.
When my health was manageable enough to return to becoming a licensed therapist, I would have had to do all 3,000 hours again, with strict constraints in accruing them a second time.
Between my ongoing health limitations, those new difficult constraints, and the direction my work and life had taken, I ultimately decided not to continue.
Having been both inside this world and outside of it (all while working with people inside of it) has given me a unique perspective that helps me do the work I do.
Scope of Work
My individual and couples work is not psychotherapy. I do not diagnose or treat mental health conditions, and this work is not a substitute for mental health care.