I'll say what I notice
Including when it's uncomfortable. I also won't push you toward feeling better before you're ready, and I don't work to a timeline.
About
About me
I'm Sophia Wang, a board-certified music therapist who practices Guided Imagery and Music. I work with adults and young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area and online, in English and Mandarin.
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I've spent over a decade using music and evidence-informed therapy with people working through trauma, relationship difficulties and questions of identity. I trained at New York University, where I studied Analytical Music Therapy and Vocal Psychotherapy with the people who developed them.
I was born in China. I practice in English and Mandarin, and I'm familiar with the particular pressures that come with immigrant family life — obligation, expectation, and the work of holding more than one set of cultural assumptions at the same time.
My view of this work is that it isn't primarily about correcting what's wrong with a person. It's about becoming reacquainted with who they were before the adaptations they made in order to manage something.
Background
A decade in hospitals
Before opening this practice I worked in oncology, palliative care, psychiatry and rehabilitation — at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Mount Sinai, and in the Bay Area since. Hospitals, psychiatric units, recovery programs and community mental health.
That is where I learned what music can do when talking has become difficult or isn't available. It also means that I've sat with a good deal, and there isn't much a client could bring that I'd find shocking.
Training and credentials
- Board-Certified Music Therapist (MT-BC), CBMT
- MA in Music Therapy, New York University
- MBA in Healthcare Management
- Analytical Music Therapy, Vocal Psychotherapy, Medical Music Therapy — NYU
- Guided Imagery and Music — practitioner, trained in the Bonny Method
- Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research, CIIS
- Bilingual practice — English and Mandarin
How I work with people
What to expect from me
I take your account seriously
I'm not going to reinterpret your experience back to you. This matters especially for people whose judgment has been undermined in a previous relationship.
Cultural context is familiar to me
Family obligation, expectations around achievement, holding two cultures at once. You won't need to explain the background before we can begin.
Difficult material is welcome
I came from oncology and psychiatric wards. Grief, anger, shame — none of it will change how I regard you.
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Also
I'm a working violinist
Classically trained, and now playing ambient and electronic work as well.
This is relevant to the clinical work. Knowing music from the inside — how a phrase builds tension, where a piece offers somewhere to rest — is what makes selecting it for a particular person a clinical decision rather than a matter of taste.
Getting started
A free twenty-minute consultation by phone or video, with no obligation to continue.