Dr. Philip Takakjian

Dr. Philip Martin Takakjian is a licensed clinical psychologist with 37 years of specialized experience integrating Eastern and Western approaches to healing. Dr. Takakjian's unique perspective combines rigorous clinical training with deep wisdom traditions, creating a therapeutic approach that addresses both psychological symptoms and underlying existential patterns.

Dr. Takakjian specializes in addiction treatment, trauma recovery, and psychosomatic medicine—conditions where mind and body are intimately connected. His work emphasizes understanding the root causes of suffering rather than simply treating symptoms, making his therapy both deeply transformative and clinically sound.

Dr. Takakjian's 37 years of clinical experience, including a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford Medical School's VA program, place him in a category of practitioners whose diagnostic intuition and therapeutic judgment have been refined through a volume of complex cases that most clinicians never accumulate. For patients with longstanding addiction, unresolved trauma, or chronic psychosomatic presentations who have worked with multiple providers without lasting results, that depth of experience changes what is possible in treatment.

His integration of Zen Buddhist practice into clinical work is not an add-on to conventional psychotherapy. It reflects a 25-year parallel discipline that shapes how he understands suffering, impermanence, and the conditions that allow genuine psychological change. In practice this means he works with patients at the level of their relationship to suffering itself, not only the symptoms that suffering produces, which is particularly relevant for addiction, where behavioral change without a shift in the underlying existential pattern tends to produce relapse.