About Me My name is David Shih-Chun Wu and I’m a licensed clinical social worker with over ten years of experience providing end of life & mental health services in English and Mandarin in the Bay Area.
I bring a range of life experiences to work as a therapist. I am a gay, Asian American, cisgender man (pronouns he/him). I have been a family caregiver for a loved one with severe mental illness. I am a husband and a father, an artist and a meditator, and most recently worked as a hospice social worker for 7 years. All these aspects of my background inform my work as a therapist, and I welcome and invite all the varied aspect of your background to enter our work together as well. My background in community mental health & hospice care has taught me to work with a wide range of identities and populations. In my clinical training, and especially in my years in hospice, I return to the grounding that no one approach will work with every client. As your therapist, I hope to see what tools and frameworks might be most helpful to you right now, in the particular complexities of your life, and in turn offer them in the spirit of mending, healing, and growing.
Challenges/issues I work with:
Life Transitions & Purpose (career, family, and relationships)
Spiritual Process & Development
Motivation & Goals
Issues of Marginalization
Sexuality & Identity
Grief & Loss
Coping with Chronic Illness
Death & Dying
Anxiety & Depression
Trauma
I support my clients in honoring their unique identities, pay attention to their present moment, their bodily and minds states with presence and kindness (a simple working definition of mindfulness). In turn, my clients can move lovingly towards their current struggles, mend and heal, clarify and envision, and grow and root in wisdom. They can also develop loving relationships with their chronic symptoms which can include: grief, stress, anxiety, depression, focus/attention, anger, energy mismanagement, etc.
Training & Licensure I hold my master’s degree in Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley. I am a member of the National Association of Social Work. I am also a graduate of East Bay Meditation Center's Commit to Dharma (C2D) and Practice in Transformative Action (PiTA) programs. I am certified as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) and in Palliative & End-of-Life Care through Smith College.
My license to practice psychotherapy in California is LCSW #77882.