802-551-2516
Silla Siebert, LMFT #125238
Hello and Welcome
My clients most often reach out when life feels overwhelming. They are experiencing emotional pain—feeling sad, anxious, hopeless, angry, numb, stressed, or isolated. These emotions can cloud thinking and impair decision-making, making it feel as if change is impossible and that no one else could understand. If you’re needing support and fear seeking help, you are not alone. So many suffer in silence and feel they "should" be okay and be able to cope alone.
It takes courage to reach out and take the first step. It takes some self- compassion and vulnerability.
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As a licensed and highly trained Marriage and Family Therapist, I approach therapy with warmth, deep empathy, and a strong sense of integrity. My clients often describe me as compassionate, grounded, and easy to talk to. I believe that creating a safe, respectful, and nonjudgmental space is essential to healing.
In our work together, I support you in exploring emotional challenges, identifying strengths, and developing effective tools for coping and communication. Therapy with me is collaborative and tailored to your needs—whether you’re seeking symptom relief, personal insight, or a more meaningful connection with yourself and others. I practice from a values-based, ethical foundation and take great care to build trust and support each client’s autonomy and dignity.
Therapy offers relief through connection, increased self-awareness, practical tools, and a broader perspective. The outcome is often greater clarity, improved relationships—with others and with yourself—and a renewed sense of well-being.
My background includes extensive training in high-acuity and crisis-focused settings, particularly with teens and families navigating severe stressors. This systems-based perspective benefits all of my clients, whether individuals, couples, or families, by helping them understand themselves not just in isolation, but within the larger context of their relationships and environments.
Therapy services
Family Therapy
Family therapy is a type of treatment designed to help with issues that specifically affect families' mental health and functioning. It can help individual family members build stronger relationships, improve communication, and manage conflicts within the family system.
Some of the primary goals of family therapy are to create a better home environment, solve family issues, and understand the unique issues that a family might face.
Adolescent Individual Therapy
Psychotherapy helps children and adolescents in a variety of ways. They receive emotional support, resolve conflicts with people, understand feelings and problems, and try out new solutions to old problems.
Adult Individual Therapy
Therapy, also called psychotherapy or counseling, is the process of meeting with a therapist to resolve problematic behaviors, beliefs, feelings, relationship issues, and/or somatic responses (sensations in the body)
Couples Therapy
Couples therapy is used for addressing issues in relationship. The therapist acts as a facilitator to keep the conversations civil, without partners
blaming each other. Couple will learn new skills in communication, emotional attunement, and explore/develop a plan for ways to improve the relationship. You can expect questions and lots of open and honest communication.
Fees & Insurance
(In-person or Telehealth)
About Me
Silla Siebert (she/her) is an experienced, culturally attuned psychotherapist specializing in individual, family, and group therapy for adolescents and adults. Her approach is grounded in evidence-based modalities, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). Silla is also trained in family systems theory and attachment-based approaches, drawing from Bowenian, Strategic, and Structural models.
Silla’s background in yoga and mindfulness, combined with decades of working with diverse populations, informs her integrative and holistic therapeutic style. She has extensive clinical experience in high-acuity environments such as Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHP) and Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP), with a focus on severe substance use disorders, co-occurring mental health conditions, teen self-harm and suicidal ideation, and high-conflict family dynamics—including contentious divorce and parental alienation.
With over 20 years of international travel and cross-cultural engagement, Silla has developed deep cultural competence. She has worked in settings ranging from school-based harm-reduction programs and youth mentoring to yoga and mindfulness instruction in both public and correctional institutions. Her lifelong passion for psychology—as an art, science, intellectual pursuit, and spiritual practice—continues to shape her deeply empathetic and thoughtful approach to therapy.
A Bit About Therapy
The hardest part is reaching out ...
Therapy means a space to explore, process, and resolve Emotional Pain. Pain resulting from mild to debilitating depressive symptoms, anxiety, despair and grief from loss, ongoing emotional and physical symptoms as consequence of childhood or adult trauma, high-level of conflict/dysfunction in intimate and professional relationships, impacts of illnesses and caregiving, disordered eating, body-shame and loathing, sexual struggles, , systemic racism, gender and sexual orientation struggles, social pressures for ever-more success and high-status perfection, intense shame existing in secrecy and self-loathing, addiction challenges and so many other struggles.
As humans we often manage, and get through with support of loved ones, hobbies, our profession, sports, etc. Yet for many, another crisis equals inability to cope.
It is a sad truth that the shame of needing help, strong secret feelings of being inadequate, to blame, unworthy of support and care, prevent many from engaging in preventative therapy, and only when a crisis appears do we "dare" reach out, or when we are "made" to come to treatment.
Most humans need greater awareness of our minds and bodies, we need to learn and develop healthy acceptance and thus skills in distress tolerance, regulation of our emotions, greater effectiveness in interpersonal struggles, healthier intentional boundaries, and ultimately a way out of a deepening sense of isolation, hopelessness and sadness. The isolation leaves people internally desperate, many experience suicidal thoughts, self-harm, or addictive coping. Ultimately, it is fear and a deep sense of shame and isolation in our suffering, which prevents so many from getting help before crisis.
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Our culture, upbringing, and inner binary assumptions creates unhealthy, false thinking patterns, like "I should not feel this way", "what is wrong with me", "everyone else copes better", "I don't deserve treatment", ""I am too far gone" or "it is my own fault", or "I am not good enough", "I am not lovable" , and ultimately "I don't matter". These symptomatic thinking distortions leave many too ashamed to ask for help and perpetuates the negative feelings/thoughts.
Mental health support is a shared space where you matter, are enough, lovable, and deserving. Therapy reminds us of this fact. Therapy helps you explore influences, past and present that impact you NOW. Therapy teaches you how to tolerate your emotions, feelings and be aware of your thoughts and how to cope with thinking. Therapy teaches you how to live intentionally with purpose and meaning as you manage and control your behavior, and therefore your life.
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As humans, we seek to SURVIVE intrinsically, yet THRIVING is different. Therapy helps you thrive.
It takes courage and a first step. You looking on here may be that step.
The Guesthouse
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This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
~ Rumi
A bit about Self Discovery ...
“I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn't my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It's a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.
walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
I walk down another street.”
― Portia Nelson
There's a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery
Contact Me
For more information and to schedule a session,please complete form below or call.
Office Address:
Family Therapy Institute
111 E Arrellaga St, Santa Barbara, CA 93101
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Phone: 802-551-2516
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