Your Guides
Christa Santangelo
PhD
Christa Santangelo is an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a psychologist with over thirty years of experience guiding profound personal transformation. Her work begins where conventional approaches often stop — not at the surface of behavior or symptom, but at the root of identity itself. She works with those who feel the gap between who they have learned to be and who they sense they actually are.
Her approach weaves together psychodynamic insight, somatic awareness, and spiritual depth — integrated not as techniques but as a unified way of seeing. What she is after is not adjustment or improvement, but what she calls self-reclamation: the stripping away of inherited identities, unconscious patterns, and false selves to reveal what she calls the soul's blueprint — the core essence that was always there, waiting to be lived.
She is also the author of A New Theory of Teenagers (Hachette). Her work attracts people who have tried the conventional answers and found them insufficient — and who are ready, finally, for something that works at the root.
Naum Rikshpun
PhD
Naum Rikshpun is a depth psychologist with over twenty-five years of experience working with individuals and groups across Europe and the United States. Born in Ukraine, he immigrated to the US as a teenager — an experience that brought him face to face early with the challenge of building a coherent sense of self across cultures, languages, and radically different worlds. That challenge never left him. It became the ground from which his life's work grew — a deeply personal as well as professional understanding of what it means to live from an identity that was shaped by circumstance rather than chosen from within.
His path has not been a straight line. He began as a psychologist, stepped into business and entrepreneurship, and returned to psychology carrying something the consulting room alone could not have given him — a hard-won understanding of how it feels to search restlessly for something external achievement cannot provide. His therapeutic foundation draws on psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Jungian analytic psychology, and the latest consciousness research — all in service of a single deepest commitment: to understanding the nature of consciousness itself and to the inner work that reaches beyond the surface of personality into the territory where genuine awareness and transformation become possible.
At the center of his clinical philosophy is a fundamental insight: most psychological difficulties stem from identity crises — moments when unconscious beliefs about who we are conflict with our innate desire for self-expression and growth. Naum specializes in guiding people through the dissolution of limiting, often trauma-induced identities and into a larger, more empowered, and more uniquely their own sense of identity. Into the larger life that has been waiting underneath.