Dr. Rikia Ancar is a warm, direct, and supportive therapist who helps clients understand themselves within the fuller context of their relationships, families, cultures, communities, and lived experiences. She believes therapy should be a space where clients feel genuinely seen while also receiving compassionate accountability, practical tools, and thoughtful challenges that support meaningful change.

As a Contextual Marriage and Family Therapist, Dr. Ancar works with individuals, couples, and families navigating trauma, anxiety, depression, neurodivergence, relationship distress, family conflict, grief, identity concerns, and the impact of substance use on relationships. She has particular experience supporting women, especially women of color, who carry the effects of chronic stress, complex trauma, overfunctioning, cultural expectations, and relational wounds. Her work honors both the resilience clients have developed to survive and the possibility of creating lives and relationships that require less self-abandonment.

Dr. Ancar’s approach is relational, culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and neurodiversity affirming. Grounded in Contextual Family Therapy and Womanist principles, she helps clients explore how family legacies, race, gender, faith, social location, neurological wiring, and systems of power influence the ways they connect, cope, and protect themselves. She also draws from Relational Life Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, harm reduction, and somatic regulation strategies, tailoring treatment to each client rather than expecting the client to fit a single model.

In sessions, clients can expect curiosity, honesty, warmth, and collaboration. Dr. Ancar helps clients identify patterns without shame, strengthen boundaries and emotional regulation, improve communication, repair relational injuries, and build more authentic connections with themselves and others. She welcomes the complexity clients bring into the room and approaches healing as both an individual and relational process.

Dr. Ancar earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Northwestern State University, her Master of Arts in Couple and Family Therapy from Adler University, and her Doctor of Marital and Family Therapy from Loma Linda University. She is an AAMFT Approved Supervisor and is licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist in Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. In addition to her work as a therapist, she brings extensive experience in clinical leadership, higher levels of care, graduate education, and the supervision and development of emerging clinicians.

Her goal is to help clients move beyond simply managing distress and toward relationships and lives that feel more connected, sustainable, and authentically their own.