Board-Certified Clinical Psychologist | Certified Financial Therapist™
As the eldest daughter of Vietnamese refugees, I grew up with a deep understanding of how survival, migration, and family expectations can shape the way we relate to achievement, responsibility, security, and what it means to feel safe.
For many people, success is not simply about ambition. It can become connected to protection, belonging, identity, and the belief that we need to keep achieving, providing, or holding everything together in order to be okay.
That perspective has shaped my work as a psychologist. Over the years, I have worked with clients navigating trauma, anxiety, depression, perfectionism, burnout, identity, relationships, and major life transitions. Again and again, I became interested in the deeper patterns underneath these struggles: the family roles we inherit, the expectations we internalize, the ways we learn to cope, and the stories we carry about who we are supposed to be.
Money is sometimes part of that story.
Our relationship with money can reflect many of the same themes that show up elsewhere in our lives: safety, scarcity, responsibility, achievement, guilt, control, freedom, and self-worth. My training in financial psychology grew out of this broader clinical work and has given me another lens for understanding how these experiences intersect.
I am particularly interested in working with thoughtful, high-achieving people whose lives may look successful from the outside but who feel anxious, exhausted, stuck, or disconnected underneath. My goal is to help clients understand what is driving those patterns so they can respond with greater flexibility and make choices that feel more aligned with who they are now.
Dr. Huong Diep
pronounced Hong Depp
Why this work matters to me
My work is grounded in rigorous clinical training, but it is also shaped by lived experience. I understand cultural pressure, migration, reinvention, and the ways we can learn to carry responsibility long before we have language for what we are carrying.
I also understand how outward success can coexist with inner tension. People can be highly capable, accomplished, and deeply self-aware while still feeling anxious, exhausted, disconnected, or stuck in patterns that no longer fit who they are.
What matters most to me is helping people understand where those patterns came from, what they may have once protected, and whether they are still serving them now. My hope is to help clients move beyond old survival strategies and inherited expectations toward a life that feels more intentional, flexible, and fully their own.
“If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
— Toni Morrison
Training and credentials
Licensed and Certified
Licensed Psychologist in California, Nevada, New York, South Dakota, Virginia, and Washington, DC
Board Certified in Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, American Board of Professional Psychology
Certified Financial Therapist™, Financial Therapy Association
Education and Training
BA Psychology/Spanish, UCLA
MA and PsyD, Clinical Psychology at the University of Denver, with an emphasis in International Disaster Psychology
APA-accredited predoctoral internship and two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
