Another way of saying this is, how is this different from traditional talk therapy?

Talk therapy tends to stay in the realm of thought and story — understanding why, narrating what happened, problem-solving what's next. That's valuable, and it's not where this work stops.

At Vessel, we're interested in what happens when you slow down enough to move beneath thought and story into the body's own forgotten language. This is often the harder, less linear path — what depth psychology sometimes calls the night sea journey, the descent that has to happen before real integration is possible. It can be uncomfortable at first, especially if you're used to thinking your way through difficulty. But on the other side of that discomfort, again and again, we watch clarity return, vitality return, and access to beauty and joy return.

You'll likely feel at home here if:

• You've done talk therapy before and sense there's a layer underneath it you haven't reached

• You're willing to slow down, even when slowing down feels counterintuitive or uncomfortable

• You're curious about your body as a source of information, not just a symptom-carrier

• You're drawn to meaning, myth, and metaphor as ways of understanding your own life

• You're ready to encounter yourself directly, rather than only talk about yourself

This isn't the right fit if you're looking for fast, purely cognitive, symptom-management-only work — we can point you toward good resources for that, but it's not our specialty.

Relationship struggles, communication issues, and boundary work; anxiety and depression; complex trauma; ADHD and high sensitivity (HSP); and the many life transitions — becoming a parent, losing a parent, changing careers, entering perimenopause, ending a relationship, coming into a new identity — that leave us more porous and in need of real support. We work with individual teens and adults, couples, and groups.

We offer virtual sessions throughout California, and in-person sessions in the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara areas.

Reach out to schedule a free consultation. We'll talk about what's bringing you in, what kind of support might fit best — weekly sessions, an intensive, luteal phase support, or something else — and whether Vessel feels like the right container for this chapter of your work.

Depth psychology (Jung, Hillman, von Franz, Edinger, Woodman, Kohut) is interested in what lies beneath the presenting symptom — the dream, the image, the pattern that keeps repeating, the part of you that's trying to be born. Somatic work (rooted in Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing) is interested in the body as the place where all of that actually lives and moves.

Put together, this means we don't treat anxiety, depression, or relational conflict as problems to be solved and dismissed. We treat them as communication — your psyche and your nervous system's intelligence, pointing you toward what needs attention, integration, or release. Symptoms aren't the enemy. They're often the most honest messengers you have.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based approach to healing trauma and chronic stress, developed by Peter Levine. Rather than asking you to retell difficult experiences in detail, SE tracks what's happening in your nervous system in real time — sensation, impulse, activation, settling — and works gently with your body's own capacity to complete what got interrupted. Molly is a fully certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP).

The Threshold Intensive is a 3-day, deep-immersion container: 2.5 hours per day of focused somatic and depth work on something specific in your life — a threshold you're standing at, a pattern you're ready to work with more concentration than a weekly hour allows. It's for people who want to move quickly and deeply on a particular edge, rather than over months of once-a-week sessions.

Investment: $3,300

For cycling clients, Molly offers an extended 90-minute session once a month, timed to the luteal phase — the window before menstruation when many people need more holding, more spaciousness, and more support than a standard 50-minute hour allows. This offering grew out of Molly's and associate therapist Anja Svensson's shared interest in the maiden-mother-crone arc and the relationship between hormonal cycles and mental health; Anja's graduate thesis explored the intersection of the menstrual cycle and mental health, and Molly's explored navigating pregnancy and birth within the patriarchy.

Investment: $350 for 90 minutes

Yes. Beyond the Threshold Intensive and Luteal Phase Support, we can also structure longer individual sessions for clients who find that the standard 50-minute hour doesn't give enough room for somatic work to unfold and settle. This is something to discuss directly with your therapist.

Molly Mitchell-Hardt Field — Founder of Vessel, California-licensed LMFT, and fully certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Molly's clinical orientation integrates Somatic Experiencing with depth and Jungian psychology, and her graduate thesis focused on navigating pregnancy and birth within the patriarchy. Individual sessions start at $250.

Anja Svensson — Associate therapist at Vessel, supervised by Molly. Anja's graduate thesis explored the intersection between the menstrual cycle and mental health. Individual sessions start at $175.

Yes — this is one of the threads that runs through our work. We're all, to some degree, shaped by internalized patriarchal distortions: around worth, productivity, emotion, the body, power, and voice. We understand a significant amount of what shows up as anxiety, depression, disconnection, or self-abandonment as connected to these internalized patterns. Naming and unraveling this is part of how we understand healing — not as a side note, but as central to the work.