Kalani Perreira, LMFT

I am a passionate, inspired licensed marriage and family therapist. I have been in private practice for 9 years and in mental health for over 25. My work is grounded in an attachment-based, trauma-recovery, depth-oriented, and liberation-focused framework. Depending on the needs of my clients, I also incorporate parts work, somatic approaches, mindfulness, and Brainspotting. I pay close attention to what is communicated beyond language—through tone, emotion, and presence. My ability to read people allows me to hear what is often veiled but deeply important to the experiences that may be keeping someone stuck. I approach this work with humility, care, and deep respect for each person’s story.

I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who was born and raised on Maui, Hawaiʻi. I am of mixed heritage—Hawaiian and Portuguese—and grew up at the intersection of Western influence and Indigenous ways of knowing. In my community, when someone was suffering, the first line of care often came from community healers—curandeiras—who worked with energy, connected with ancestors, and attended to what could not always be seen or spoken. There was also the influence of the land itself: the place that roots us, communicates with us, and teaches us. These early experiences shaped the way I understand healing, connection, and the deeper layers of human experience.

As a trans man of mixed heritage, I have spent much of my life navigating the intersections of culture, identity, and belonging. These lived experiences have shaped my capacity to hold complexity and nuance in the therapeutic process, and they have given me a unique perspective on how we hold ourselves—and one another—in mind.

I was initially drawn to a psychoanalytic approach to therapy because it articulated many aspects of what I experienced growing up. Psychoanalysis seeks to uncover what is hidden—to see the unseen and speak the unspeakable. It offers language for how experience is transmitted between people beyond words and recognizes that the therapeutic encounter creates a “third space,” where communication can occur through feelings, images, intuition, and reverie.

For more than 25 years, I have been refining both my intuitive abilities and my Western therapeutic training. In many ways, this work has been a profound journey of returning home to the healing traditions that shaped me while integrating them with a modern psychological understanding. I have worked in the mental health field since 1995 across the San Francisco Bay Area, Maui, and Portland, Oregon, and I have been licensed and in private practice since 2017. It is a true honor to support people in their healing, growth, and self-understanding.