Meet Annia Raja, PhD
I'm a licensed clinical psychologist (California, Texas, and 40+ PSYPACT states) and the founder of Helm Psychology, a depth-oriented therapy practice for physicians, executives, entrepreneurs and founders, attorneys, and other high-achieving professionals.
I've spent over 15 years working with people whose ambition, success, and competence are real and admirable, but also do double duty as a place to hide.
Before psychology, I worked at Boston Consulting Group (management consulting) and Morgan Stanley (investment banking). And I’m also the spouse of a physician who works in an incredibly rigorous specialty.
So trust me, I know what these demanding worlds ask of people from the inside, not just across the therapy room.
Who I Work With
Most of my clients are people who everyone else depends on.
The physician who's held it together through a brutal stretch of call and can't explain why this particular Tuesday felt like the breaking point.
The founder whose company is finally profitable and on a path to acquisition, which has somehow made the dread worse, not better.
The executive who reads people brilliantly in every room at work, but often misses the mark in their own home.
The attorney who bills in six-minute increments but hasn't had an unaccounted-for hour in years.
The studio or network executive whose calendar is other people's crises, and who hasn't been asked a real question about themselves in months.
The founder who sold their company and discovered that the exit did not magically create a new identity separate from the business.
What brings them to therapy usually isn't a crisis. It's a slow realization that the strategies they’ve built their life around have started running the show: anticipating everything, outworking everyone, never being the problem, always doing the most.
The same patterns show up everywhere. With a spouse. With parents who still have a strange amount of power. With colleagues, with money, with rest. And most of all, in how they talk to themselves when no one's listening.
That's the work I love: getting underneath those patterns, rather than just managing around them. I've watched too many high achievers turn a breathing exercise into another performance metric. So in our work together, we’re going to go deep.
How I Work
I practice depth-oriented, relational psychodynamic therapy. In plain terms: we're not going to spend our time together just reviewing the week and troubleshooting fixes for it. Instead, we're going to get curious about lots of deeper things.
Things like: why the same situations keep finding you, why rest feels unsafe, why praise doesn't land, why the person who handles everything can't ask for anything, and yes, what your past has to do with it all.
For some people that's weekly therapy over a long stretch. For others, especially when burnout has made the weekly hour feel like one more thing to manage, it's a therapy intensive: several hours over a few days, doing work that would otherwise take months.
I believe deeply in the transformative power of therapy, having experienced it in my own life. I'm not a blank slate therapist. I'll be warm and direct with you, I'll remember what you said three (and 50+) sessions ago, and I'll notice the thing you've been circling around when you may be ready to hear it.
And we'll laugh. I take the work seriously, but play and humor aren't breaks from depth—instead, they're often how we get there. In fact, many of my clients have had too little of both in their lives.
As featured in…
Outside the Therapy Room
When I’m not in the therapy room, I can be found outside with something or another on my back:
My hiking pack on a multi-day backcountry trek
That same backpack in a hostel abroad somewhere
A scuba tank under the ocean
My daypack for a day hike in the mountains or strolling on the beach
A fanny pack at a good live music show/festival
If you are even more curious about me, you can check out my interview with VoyageLA Magazine, linked here:
Oh, one more thing: don’t be surprised if my orange tabby fur baby shows up in our virtual sessions!
His name is Kitty Cuddles—yes, I’m serious, that’s his real name. :)
Credentials
California - Licensed Clinical Psychologist
License #32699Texas - Licensed Clinical Psychologist
License #37973New Center for Psychoanalysis Los Angeles
Member - Professional AffiliateAmerican Psychological Association - Division 39 (Psychoanalysis)
Member
Education
Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology - The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Accredited by the American Psychological Association (APA)New Center for Psychoanalysis Los Angeles - Adult Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 2-Year Program
APA Minority Fellowship Program - Predoctoral Fellow
National Science Foundation - Graduate Research Fellow
BA in Psychology - The University of Texas at Austin
BBA in Finance and Business Honors - The University of Texas at Austin
Clinical Experience & Training
Clinical Psychologist in Private Practice
Los Angeles, California - current
Dallas, Texas - previousPostdoctoral Fellowship in Clinical Psychology
Dallas VA Medical Center (APA-Accredited) - Dallas, TexasPredoctoral Internship in Clinical Psychology
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (APA-Accredited) - Dallas, TexasBaylor University Medical Center
Obstetrics/Gynecology Department - Dallas, Texas
Other Prior Experiences
Management Consultant
Boston Consulting GroupInvestment Banking Analyst
Morgan Stanley
Still reading?
That usually means something. People who make it to the bottom of a therapist's page are rarely just browsing. If any of the people I described above sounds resonant, reach out.