Jahi Jamil Corbin

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California. I work with adults and teens on anxiety, depression, trauma, substance use, ADHD, relationship difficulties, and the kind of stuckness that is hard to name but affects everything. Most of my clinical training happened in demanding settings. I currently practice in an integrated psychiatry and addiction medicine department, and before that I worked in intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization programs with adults managing serious mental illness alongside substance use. Earlier, I supported mothers in recovery who were working to reunify with their children. That work taught me not to flinch at difficult material and not to rush people through it.

I hold a master's in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University and I am completing a doctorate in psychology at Touro University Worldwide. I am EMDR certified through an EMDRIA-approved program and I use DBT skills, motivational interviewing, and family systems work regularly. A note on who I am, since it matters to some people looking for a therapist. I am a Black man from the Bay Area. I have worked with a lot of clients carrying things they were told to keep quiet about, including what it costs to hold it together at work or in a family that does not discuss these things. You do not have to explain that context to me from scratch. I also work with couples and families, which shapes how I approach individual work. Whatever you are dealing with is happening inside relationships, and I keep that in view.

I do not come in with a script. I pay attention to what is actually happening with you and build from there.

A few things are true about how I see this work. Some pain in life is unavoidable. You cannot control most outcomes. And the work does not arrive at a finish line where everything is handled. A lot of what brings people to therapy is the effort they are spending trying to arrange life so those things are not true. That effort is exhausting, and it usually becomes its own problem. Part of what we do is stop fighting the conditions and start deciding how you want to respond to them. Most of my clients come in carrying a distorted version of their own story. Either something is a catastrophe that defines them, or it was nothing and they should be over it. Neither read leaves room to move. My work is to help you get to the neutral version. What actually happened. What it cost you. What is still in your hands. That is simplification rather than minimization. I will not over-explain your behavior until it disappears, and I will not let one thing you did harden into who you are.

In practice I am active. I will ask you to try things in session rather than only talk about them, because insight that stays verbal tends not to stick. If something painful needs processing, I use EMDR. If your emotions are running hotter than you can manage, we build those skills first, since nothing else works well until you have footing. I am direct. If I see a pattern, I will name it. You are the authority on your own life, and I am not going to tell you what it should mean.

The first session is mostly me getting to know you and you getting a feel for whether I am the right fit.

I will ask what brought you in now, since something usually shifted. We will cover history, family, health, work, substances, and previous therapy. I ask about risk directly, including thoughts of suicide or self-harm, because I ask everyone and it is better to have that in the open.

You are not obligated to tell me everything on day one. If a topic feels like too much right now, say so and we will come back to it. Toward the end I will tell you what I am noticing and how I would approach it, and you can tell me whether that sounds right. We will talk about frequency and what you want to be different.

You will not leave with everything solved. What you should leave with is a sense of whether you can work with me. If I am not the right fit, I would rather say that early and help you find someone who is.