Sima Braude is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 15 years of clinical experience helping individuals, couples, and families navigate life’s challenges and create meaningful change. She brings a warm, direct, and collaborative approach to therapy. She believes growth happens when people feel both supported and challenged, and she strives to create a space where clients can be honest, accountable and fully themselves.
Sima primarily works with couples. She uses Relational Life Therapy (RLT), a powerful and action-oriented approach that helps partners move beyond recurring conflict, defensiveness, and disconnection toward deeper understanding, intimacy, and mutual respect. Rather than simply managing symptoms, she helps couples identify the patterns that keep them stuck and develop new ways of relating that create lasting change.
In addition to her couples work, Sima has extensive experience supporting individuals facing anxiety, depression, trauma, life stressors, family conflict, and major transitions.She has extensive experience working with couples and individuals facing major life stressors, including medical illness, caregiving challenges, trauma, and high stress professions such as first responders. Her clinical background includes crisis intervention, case management, clinical supervision, and working within community mental health settings, giving her broad experience in supporting clients with diverse and complex needs.
Sima earned her Master of Social Work from California State University, Northridge, graduating summa cum laude and receiving The Lieber Family Annual Graduate Scholarship for Excellence in Research. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Near Eastern Studies from Yerevan State University, where she graduated summa cum laude.
Sima’s goal is to help clients develop healthier and stronger relationships—with themselves and with others—so they can live with greater connection, confidence, and emotional wellbeing. She passionately believes that healthy relationships are not about perfection; they are about learning how to communicate honestly, take responsibility, repair and grow together.
Outside of her clinical work, Sima enjoys learning new languages, exploring different cultures, spending time with her family and continuing her own journey of personal growth and self-discovery.
