Alia Smith, LMFT

Alia Smith is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) in California with 15 years of clinical experience. She works with adults who face addiction, trauma, low self-esteem, anxiety, bipolar and depression, and people coping with life changes. She also supports concerns such as codependency, abandonment, body image, and eating-related issues.

Alia describes clients as the experts on their own stories and builds sessions around each person’s strengths. Sessions focus on practical steps people can use between meetings. She often uses clear, hands-on techniques to help someone notice unhelpful patterns and try different ways of responding.

Her work draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people notice painful thoughts and choose actions that match their values. She also uses Client-Centered Therapy to keep sessions grounded in the client’s perspective. Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills and Motivational Interviewing appear when someone needs emotion regulation tools or help finding motivation for change.

In a typical meeting she listens to current struggles, looks for patterns that keep problems going, and helps set small, doable goals. She pays attention to how relationships and family history shape behavior, without assigning blame. Practical skills, short experiments, and real-world problem solving are common parts of therapy.

Alia works in California and conducts sessions in English. To begin, a person completes a short questionnaire and schedules an initial appointment to see how the therapist and approach fit their needs.

How her approaches translate to online work