Hi, I'm Zarana!

You've spent your whole life trying to figure out where you fit in. You are always in between languages, between your parents' expectations and your own, between the version of you that shows up at home and the one that shows up everywhere else. You're the daughter who made it, the one who got the degree or the job your family sacrificed for, and somehow you still feel like you're failing someone. Maybe it's your parents. Maybe it's yourself.

Out of necessity, you became someone who checks everything. Growing up, there wasn't always someone to figure things out for you, so you learned to find every answer yourself, and to be right about it. That instinct kept you safe once. Now it shows up as second guessing everything. You research, you double check, you find the answer and immediately go looking for the thing that could prove it wrong. No matter how much information you gather, you end up right back at more questions. Information was never going to be the thing that settled it. Your mind will always look for one more.

As an immigrant daughter myself, I know what it's like to carry two sets of expectations at once and feel like you're failing both. I know the pressure to be the one who made it, the one whose success has to justify everything your family gave up. And I know the instinct to over-prepare, over-research, and never quite trust that you've done enough, because for a long time, being right and being careful felt like the only way to stay safe.

That experience shaped how I show up for this work. I understand the specific weight of being the exception, the translator, the one who has to hold both worlds together without ever fully belonging to either one. I know how exhausting it is to search for certainty in a life that was never going to hand you any.

You don't have to pick a side to belong somewhere, and you don't have to have every answer to be safe.

I'm a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with over a decade of experience working with immigrant daughters, first-generation professionals and students, and adults caught between two cultures. My clients are high achieving, often the ones everyone in the family leans on, and quietly exhausted from carrying the weight of two sets of expectations at once. For many of them, that pressure to have it figured out shows up as anxiety or OCD, especially the reassurance-seeking, over-researching kind, and I have specialized training in Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) to treat exactly that, including when it's tangled up with trauma.

How I work

I draw from Relational Psychodynamic Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Exposure Response Prevention (ERP), and Motivational Interviewing, adapted to fit your background rather than asking you to leave it at the door, all within The COVE Method, Therapy Cove's signature trauma framework. Therapy here isn't about cutting ties with your culture or your family. It's about learning to trust yourself without needing one more piece of information first.

Over the course of my career I've worked across every level of care, from detox and residential to PHP, IOP, and community mental health settings, with individuals and couples navigating addiction, relationship struggles, anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, and multicultural family dynamics. I've watched people move from feeling stuck between two worlds, and stuck in their own heads, to feeling grounded in both. Witnessing that "ah-ha" moment, the one where it clicks that you get to define yourself, is the most rewarding part of this work.

Whether you're navigating who you are outside your family's expectations, caught in a loop of second guessing yourself, or working through anxiety, OCD, or trauma that's tangled up in all of it, this is a space where every part of you is welcome, not just the parts that translate easily.

Outside the therapy room, you'll find me going for long walks at the park, spending time with my family and friends, watching Disney or Pixar movies, or going to a concert.

You've spent long enough making yourself understandable to everyone else.

Let's find out who you are when you're not translating, or second guessing. Let's chat!