About

Curious about people
from the very beginning.

Vera Fleischer, LMFT

From a young age I have been fascinated by what drives people — their deepest desires and insecurities, and how these shape personality and behavior. Due to my own shame about personal challenges, it took me a while to realize how helpful psychotherapy can be. Once I embraced help for myself, I knew I wanted to become a psychotherapist. As I stepped into that role, it became clear that this work meets me in the areas of authentic communication, emotional bonding, relational repair, and creative expression.

Training & licensure

I graduated with a Master of Arts in Integral Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in 2014. I received training in Gestalt therapy and depth-oriented psychotherapy at the Church Street Integral Counseling Center in San Francisco for two years, and was a member of the Bay Area Gestalt Institute for several years. As of 2016, I am licensed in California as a Marriage and Family Therapist.

I had a private practice in the Mission District of San Francisco until the end of 2019, and now practice exclusively online, serving clients in California from my home base in Cologne, Germany.

Background

I grew up in Germany and lived in the United States for over 23 years, 17 of those in San Francisco. A lot of my personal growth work has been around processing the guilt and shame associated with Germany’s history.

Values & posture

One topic that’s really important to me as a therapist and as a human is oppression and privilege. My work is informed by a strongly developed antiracist and social justice lens, and I spend a lot of time thinking and raising awareness about racism, sexism, heterosexism, and pronatalism.

Social location: I identify as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, childless woman. My pronouns are she / her.

Memberships

What if who you are
is already enough?

Therapy can help you discover, be, and appreciate more of who you are. When I was a self-conscious, insecure teenager, I remember always hearing the advice “Just be yourself.” I talked to a dear friend about this once and said to him, “What if who you are sucks? Should you still be yourself then?” He said that he didn’t know.

Shame and insecurity kept both of us from seeing that the answer was yes. The idea of “sucking” either comes from shame, or from ideas and projections from other people, or both. Once you free yourself from shame and from being other-directed, you start seeing that there are good reasons for why you are the way you are — and that who you are is okay.

You can then move from self-consciousness to self-awareness. You become aware of your strengths and weaknesses without shaming or blaming yourself. You can make self-directed decisions about the changes you want to make in your life.

The truth is that we don’t suck, and we are not perfect either. We are good enough. You’ll sometimes see my practice advertised as Good Enough Psychotherapy. Psychologist D.W. Winnicott coined the term “good enough parenting.” There is no such thing as perfect parenting. If you received good enough parenting, you were lucky enough to get the best parenting possible.

There is also no such thing as a perfect human being. We make ourselves miserable trying to be perfect. Knowing that we are good enough is really all we need. Psychotherapy can help you discover and achieve what is good enough for you and your life.

“Doing what you were born to do… That’s the way to be happy.”
— Agnes Martin