Lucy Sunday MFT, cMT-P
I was raised in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, surrounded by contemplatives, meditators, and artists. From an early age, my father ran a social-model hospice, steeping me in an awareness of impermanence, and a life oriented around care and connection. This upbringing gave me my deepest strengths as a therapist: a steady relationship with uncertainty, and a trust that the present moment is where real possibility lives.
Before I became a therapist, I built and led progressive HR departments for global health and wellness companies. That work eventually pulled me toward a more radical, anti-capitalist understanding of what wellbeing actually requires, and away from the systems I'd been working inside.
My own path has been shaped by years of meditation practice, and by a commitment to meeting my own suffering with compassion instead of resistance. The liberation I’ve found through that path is what brought me to this profession.
This reverence for complexity shapes how I work as a systemic therapist. I support couples, and families navigating relationships shaped by family history and the wider forces around them, trusting that healing happens when we meet ourselves and each other with presence and care.
I work relationally, attuning to the whole person or system; emotional, neurobiological, cognitive, somatic, and spiritual. I'm guided by a lived sense of the world as poetic and deeply interconnected, and by a real confidence in our basic goodness.
I show up fully in the room, because I believe that's what helps you do the same.
"I have spent years sitting with couples in their hardest moments. What I know is this: the longing to feel connected is always there. It is the fear, the self-protection, the old wounds that make it hard to feel into. That is where our work begins."
Training & Credentials
MA in Couple & Family Therapy AUNE · MFT
Gottman Method Couples Therapy – Levels I and II
Internal Family Systems (IFS) - Certified Level I
Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) – Dan Siegel, MD (Certification in progress)
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) Externship & Core Skills I-IV
Pragmatic Experiential Couples Therapy (PET-C) - Level I
Certified Mindfulness Teacher (IMTA) 500 hours cMT-P - The Engaged Mindfulness Institute
Neurodiverse Couples Therapy - Relational Life Therapy (RLT) Caron Starobin & Terry Real
The Art of Jungian Couples Therapy - Pacifica Graduate Institute
Trauma Informed Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (TF-DBT) - AMFM Healthcare
Somatic Experiencing (SE) – Foundational Theory & Principles Certification
Sessions Live: Mating In The Metacrisis with Esther Perel
Specialization in Trauma & LGBTQIA+ Affirming Practice – AUNE
Working with Polyamorous & Ethically Non-Monogamous Couples (Supervision, Yana Tallon-Hicks, LMFT)
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) – The Engaged Mindfulness Institute
Death & Dying Guidance - Sarah House Hospice of Santa Barbara
Ongoing Dharma study, practice, and instruction with Sam Bercholz