ABOUT MARYEM IRIAS, LMFT
into the inner landscape
I’m a California-licensed Marriage and Family Therapist offering in-person therapy in South Pasadena and virtual sessions throughout California.
Listening to What Wants to Be Known
There often comes a point in life when we're called toward a deeper awareness of ourselves. When the symptoms we carry, the stories we've inherited, and even the dreams that visit us in the night are no longer background noise, but invitations. They ask to be witnessed. They ask to be understood as messengers, pointing toward something asking to be known. If you've felt that pull, a sense that there is more meaning available to you, if only you had a companion for the journey, I'm glad you're here.
WHO I WORK WITH
Who Find Their Way Here
The people who find their way to my practice are often thoughtful, deeply feeling individuals who sense that their struggles are not simply symptoms to eliminate, but invitations to listen more deeply to themselves. They are artists, writers, therapists, caregivers, parents, seekers, and others who long for a life that feels more authentic, connected, and aligned with who they are.
I work especially well with individuals who may have done years of therapeutic work and know their story well, yet sense that something remains beyond what can be explained. They are ready to move from understanding their personal story toward listening for the deeper, archetypal, and imaginal currents moving through it. Many of my clients are drawn to dreams, symbolism, the body, nature, and the unseen dimensions of experience as pathways toward deeper meaning and connection.
If you are looking for a space where your inner life is honored, where growth is approached with both gentleness and accountability, and where therapy is understood as an invitation into a deeper relationship rather than a search for quick answers, you may feel at home here.
How the therapeutic relationship works
Healing Happens Through Relationship
My work is grounded in the understanding that meaningful transformation happens through relationship. Our therapeutic relationship becomes a place where old patterns can be held with compassion, where new ways of relating can emerge, and where the wisdom of the body, psyche, dreams, imagination, and the living world can be welcomed into the conversation.
It is a collaborative journey that asks for curiosity, courage, and a willingness to actively participate in your own unfolding. Together, we slow down, remain in dialogue with what is difficult, and cultivate a deeper understanding and acceptance of ourselves and our relationships, allowing new ways of relating to naturally emerge.
The Stories We Carry
Many of us carry stories that did not begin with us. Together, we explore the relational, familial, ancestral, and cultural patterns that have shaped your life, honoring both the gifts and the burdens carried across generations. As these patterns become more visible, new possibilities emerge—not only for your own life, but for the relationships you nurture and the generations that follow.
Coming Into Right Relationship
I believe that the deepest transformations occur as we come into right relationship—with ourselves, with those we love, with our ancestors and descendants, and with the more-than-human world. My role is to accompany you with deep, heartfelt presence as we bear witness to your unfolding together.
In time, this work invites us to remember our place within the larger web of life and to cultivate relationships rooted in greater integrity, reciprocity, and belonging.
My Approach
attending to the ecological self
My work draws from relational, somatic, depth, ecological and transpersonal traditions. Orientations that, together, honor the full complexity of who you are.
Relational
I believe healing happens between people, not in isolation. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a living laboratory, a place where old wounds can be met with new experience. In the safety of genuine connection, patterns that once felt fixed become available for change.
Somatic
Everything is held in the cells and tissues of our bodies — our history, our patterns, our unspoken grief and resilience. The body is not incidental to this work; it is essential to it. I draw on training in Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing to support trauma resolution, alongside EMDR and touch work, to help the nervous system complete what it once had to interrupt. Rather than only thinking our way through what's difficult, we make room to feel, release, and integrate through the body itself — trusting its wisdom as a guide toward healing.
Depth
My training in depth psychology shapes an understanding that much of what shapes us lives beneath the surface — in dreams, symbols, the unconscious, and the stories we've inherited. Depth work invites us to listen to what wants to be known, trusting that symptoms and struggles often carry meaning, and that the psyche is always moving toward wholeness.
At its heart, depth work creates a space of reverie — a slower, more spacious way of attending to the psyche that allows us to develop a deeper, more intimate relationship with our inner world. This is a practice I return to in my own life as much as I offer it in my work with clients — it has taught me to trust what rises slowly, rather than rushing toward answers. Mythos, stories, poetry, music, and other forms of human expression become ways of amplifying the soul's journey — offering images and language for what is often difficult to say directly. Woven through all creative expression, and through the very content of our lives, are archetypal patterns: recurring themes and figures that connect our individual experience to something larger, older, and shared across generations.
Transpersonal
Alongside the personal, I hold space for the dimensions of experience that reach beyond the individual self — spiritual longing, ancestral inheritance, mystical or unitive experience, and our relationship to something larger than ourselves. This lens honors that healing is not only psychological, but can also be soulful, sacred, and expansive.
Together, these orientations shape a way of working that is relational at its core, embodied in practice, attentive to depth, and open to mystery.
Education & Training
PhD candidate at Pacifica, Depth Psychology and Integrative Healing Practices
Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute
Certified Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner
Trained in Touch Skills for Trauma Therapists with Kathy L. Kain, PhD
Certificate in Jungian Sandplay from the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles
Trained in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
My education and training have shaped an integrative, depth-oriented approach that attends to the person in context—psyche and body, relationships and culture, systems and histories, place and the living world. I am currently a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, completing my dissertation.
Pacifica’s commitment to cultural diversity and individual uniqueness, along with its guiding principle, animae mundi colendae gratia (nurturing the soul of the world), has deepened my exploration of the connection between psyche and body.
I also completed my three-year Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner certification, expanding my ability to bring the body's intelligence into my work. Somatic Experiencing® integrates neuroscience, stress physiology, and indigenous healing practices, complementing psychodynamic and depth psychology approaches.
I am also trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), an effective tool for clients who need additional support in healing from past trauma.
