Psychotherapist & writer — Berkeley, California
Minds are made in families.
I'm Brandon Worden, a family therapist and psychoanalyst. I work with families and individuals in my Berkeley practice, and I write about what family life reveals about the human mind — drawing on psychoanalysis, Jung, attachment research, and contemporary neuroscience.
01 — The practice
A genuine encounter with the mind.
Therapy, done seriously, is not symptom management. It is the work of understanding how a family actually operates — the loyalties, silences, and inherited patterns that shape every member — and of finding the places where change is genuinely possible.
I work with families in crisis and in transition, with couples, with parents, and with individuals whose difficulties trace back to the family they came from or the one they are trying to build. I have particular depth in adoption, and in the questions it raises about origin, belonging, and identity — questions that turn out to matter for everyone.
The work is slow by design. I keep a small practice so that each family gets the attention this kind of change requires.
- Sessions
- $400 · 50 minutes
- Format
- In person & telehealth
- Location
- Berkeley, California
02 — Writing
Essays on the family and the human condition.
I write essays at Meristem, my Substack — for readers, not for clinicians. Each one takes an honest question about the mind and follows it wherever it goes.
Mattering
To matter is to become matter. On how a mind first takes shape by being held in someone else's — and why no one learns to matter alone.
Read at Meristem →The Pearl
On despair as dissociation from agency — and whether an unchosen loss can ever become a chosen act of giving.
Coming soonNew essays arrive by email. Subscribe to Meristem — it's free.
03 — About
Brandon Worden, LMFT
I've spent my career inside families — as a therapist, an analyst, and a student of why people become who they become. My training is psychoanalytic and Jungian; my curiosity runs through attachment theory, phenomenology, and the neuroscience of early development. I practice in Berkeley, California.
The through-line in all of it: the family is the first philosophy department. Before we have ideas about the world, we have a family — and the family is where the mind first learns what a mind is.
- Psychoanalysis
- Jungian analysis
- Family systems
- Attachment theory
- Neuroscience
- Adoption
- LMFT #99264
04 — Contact
Begin the conversation.
Berkeley, CA 94705
I respond to every inquiry personally, usually within two business days. A brief phone consultation is the best way for both of us to know whether the work is a fit.