Therapy for Family Office Principals
and Their Families.
Clinical, licensed psychotherapy for principals, operating founders, and next-generation family members. The discretion, specificity, and multi-state coverage that family office relationships require, without spending the first ten sessions explaining what your life is.
Principals Don't Need a General Therapist.
Principals and operating founders live inside a specific set of conditions that general clinical practice rarely encounters directly. Significant resources that reshape every relationship. Identity entangled with a role, a company, or a family name. Decisions that carry more weight in a week than most careers hold in a year. Privacy concerns that change what can be said to whom, and where. A generalist therapist, even a good one, spends months learning what your principal's life is actually like before meaningful clinical work begins. That is time and money spent subsidizing a learning curve.
The patterns I see most often in family office clients are specific and they repeat. Identity disorientation after a liquidity event. Purpose questions once survival is no longer the driver. Relational isolation that no one around the principal can fully hear. Family dynamics that become more intricate, not simpler, with resources. Couples work for marriages where both partners carry public weight. Grief after the loss of a principal. The practice starts by assuming these conditions exist.
This work sits inside a specific intersection: clinical psychotherapy, high-performance context, and multi-state licensure. The practice was built for it, not stretched to fit.
The Specific Issues Wealth Surfaces.
Most principals do not come in during a crisis. They come in because a specific pattern has been running long enough that it has started to cost them. These are the ones I see most often.
Identity Beyond Wealth or Role
The question of who you are when the role, the company, or the family name has been doing the work of defining you. Particularly acute after a sale, a retirement, or a generational handoff.
Post-Liquidity Adjustment
The internal experience after a major liquidity event: a sale, an IPO, an inheritance, a windfall. The outside world congratulates. The inside is usually more complicated.
The Isolation of Wealth
Being surrounded by people who all have a stake in your stability, and therefore the last people you can be fully honest with. Particularly acute for principals without peer relationships at the same level.
Next-Generation Concerns
For current principals, the quiet worry about what the money will do to the next generation. For the next generation, the question of what to build when survival is already solved.
Family Dynamics Under Resources
Resources that were supposed to make things easier often make family constellations more intricate. Couples work and family-of-origin work for situations where money is never the only factor.
After the Loss of a Principal
The specific grief and logistical weight carried by a surviving spouse or family after a principal's death. Clinical work for the grief and for the identity reorganization that follows.
Discretion Built Into the Structure.
The privacy concerns around family office work are not solved by trust alone. They are solved by structural choices that determine who has access to information in the first place. The practice is built around a few of them.
Cash-pay, no insurance billing. Insurance creates a permanent record: a diagnosis, a session log, a paper trail that lives outside the clinical relationship. Without insurance, none of that exists. Superbills are available on request for principals who choose to file with their own PPO for out-of-network reimbursement. The decision belongs to the principal, and no record is created by default.
HIPAA-compliant secure video. All sessions use a platform compliant with HIPAA for healthcare providers. Sessions are not recorded, not stored, and not shared.
No PHI at inquiry. The contact form collects no clinical information. Advisors and gatekeepers can reach out on behalf of a principal without disclosing any personal health detail, including the principal's name until there is explicit consent to introduce.
No third-party disclosure without written consent. No information is shared with employers, boards, trustees, attorneys, or family office staff without explicit written authorization from the client.
Solo private practice. This is not a group practice with shared electronic records, covering colleagues, or rotating case managers. Every clinical interaction is with Diana directly.
Clinically Trained. Institutionally Grounded.
Diana Chu is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #105546 California, TPMF785 Florida) and Registered Drama Therapist (RDT #659). She holds a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and serves as an Interpersonal Dynamics Facilitator at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, working with MBA students and senior executives on emotional intelligence and self-awareness under pressure.
Before building her private practice, Diana worked as an advisor to mental health tech startups, which gave her direct exposure to the psychology of building and operating at scale. The Stanford GSB work adds a second lens: hundreds of hours observing how high-achieving people actually relate when the stakes are real. The practice sits at the intersection of high performance, identity, and mental health, and it is the entire practice, not a specialty bolted onto a general one.
Diana serves principals, founders, and family members of family office clients in California and Florida. She has experience across the specific patterns named above, and understands the difference between a therapist who has read about this demographic and one who has sat in the room with it.
Learn More About Diana →How a Referral Actually Works.
Family office staff, financial advisors, and trust attorneys can initiate a referral without requiring the principal to take the first step. The process is short and procedural.
1. Initial contact. An advisor, gatekeeper, or family office staff member reaches out by email or phone. No principal information is required at this stage.
2. Brief introductory call. A 15-minute conversation between Diana and the referring party to discuss what the principal is navigating, what they are looking for in a therapist, and whether the fit is appropriate. No clinical disclosure required.
3. Consent and introduction. If the fit looks right, Diana is introduced to the principal with their consent. Nothing moves forward without the principal's explicit agreement.
4. Free consultation. The principal has a free 20-minute consultation directly with Diana before committing to any work. This is the principal's own opportunity to assess the match.
5. Sessions begin. Weekly or bi-weekly 50-minute sessions via HIPAA-compliant secure video. Scheduling accommodates multi-residence and travel patterns across California and Florida.
Questions From Advisors and Principals.
Yes. Initial inquiry can come from an advisor, family office staff, or an assistant. Identifying details are kept to a minimum until the principal is ready to be in direct contact. The first conversation can happen at whatever pace is appropriate.
Both. Diana's practice works with founders and executives. Principals and their family members sit inside that work with additional focus on wealth, identity, and the relational dynamics of family offices.
Yes. Sessions can be paid through a family office or family trust. No insurance is billed, which means no third-party records are created through that channel.
Yes. Adult next-generation members often bring their own version of identity and purpose questions alongside the experience of managing or inheriting significant wealth. This is a distinct clinical focus.
Sessions are telehealth only. Clients must be physically located in California or Florida at the time of session.
Each person's work is confidential to that person. Nothing shared in one session is carried into another's without explicit permission, with the rare exception of a legal mandate.
Begin with a conversation, not a commitment.
Advisors and family office staff are welcome to reach out directly to discuss a potential referral. No principal information is required to start the conversation.
Cash-pay · HIPAA-compliant telehealth · California & Florida