By Intentional Spaces Psychotherapy
Van Phan didn’t always know she’d become a therapist. In fact, she didn’t even know therapy was an option until college. Raised in a Vietnamese-American immigrant household where emotional needs were often unspoken, Van grew up in survival mode—performing, pleasing, and quietly wondering why everything felt so heavy. Mental health wasn’t a topic of conversation. Feelings weren’t labeled. And yet, somewhere inside, she knew something was missing.
It wasn’t until Van sat across from a therapist herself that things began to shift. “I didn’t have the words for what I was going through,” she says, “but someone finally helped me find them.” That experience cracked something open—a realization that healing could happen not through fixing, but through witnessing. That’s when she knew: this wasn’t just a field. It was her calling.
Van brings a deeply personal lens to her work. As a first-generation Vietnamese American woman, she understands the quiet pressure to succeed, to suppress, to carry everything without asking for help. She’s lived the experience of undiagnosed anxiety, academic struggle, and the hollow feeling of not being enough, even when doing everything right. These lived truths now shape how she shows up for her clients: with softness, clarity, and zero judgment.
She’s especially attuned to clients who feel like they’re “waking up late” to their identity—whether that’s navigating neurodivergence, queer selfhood, or family dynamics that never quite made space for them. Van’s clients don’t have to translate. They don’t have to explain why it’s hard to rest or why success still feels empty. She gets it.
What Van offers isn’t just therapy—it’s a relationship built on mutual respect, emotional resonance, and permission to start exactly where you are. “I bring my full self into the room,” she says. “Because I know what it’s like to feel invisible.”
For anyone who’s ever felt too behind, too much, or not enough—Van is here to say:
You’re right on time.
You’re already worthy.
And this space is for you.
