27 W 96th Street #1F
New York, NY 10025
174 Nassau Street #408
Princeton, NJ 08540
Elena E. Kim, PhD
Founder & Clinical Director | Licensed Psychologist
Dr. Kim is a licensed psychologist and co-developer of Existential-Spiritual Psychotherapy (ESP), an integrative framework guiding the work at RISE Center. She provides depth-oriented psychotherapy for individuals and couples navigating complex emotional, relational, and existential concerns.
Her approach integrates relational and psychodynamic therapy with Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), grounded in strong multicultural awareness and sensitivity to the broader systems shaping each person’s experience. Therapy is structured and reflective, while remaining collaborative, patient, and responsive to what unfolds over time. She approaches therapy with steadiness and care, creating space for difficult questions to be explored without urgency or judgment.
Areas of Focus
Understanding the patterns that quietly shape your life.
Leadership & Development
Founder of RISE Center, Shaping its Clinical Vision and Training
Multicultural & Social Context
Cultural Context as Central — not Peripheral — to Understanding You
From Performance to Presence
Understanding of Achievement Culture From the Inside
Scholarship & Professional Engagement
Scholarship That Deepens and Strengthens Clinical Care
Dr. Kim often works with individuals who find themselves repeating familiar patterns—striving, adapting, achieving—while quietly feeling unsettled or disconnected. She is attentive to the ways family expectations, cultural identity, faith, and relational dynamics shape both suffering and resilience.
Her work frequently explores anxiety, depression, multicultural identities, faith integration, relational conflict, and questions of meaning and direction. Therapy is intentional and thoughtfully paced, creating space for clarity, insight, and meaningful change.
As founder of RISE Center, Dr. Kim oversees clinician training and the continued development of Existential-Spiritual Psychotherapy (ESP). The model integrates evidence-based treatments within a structured depth-oriented framework that emphasizes multicultural orientation, relational context, and existential reflection.
Through ongoing consultation and collaborative training, she works to ensure the practice remains clinically rigorous, culturally responsive, and grounded in a shared therapeutic vision.
Dr. Kim’s clinical work has been shaped by sustained engagement with diverse communities and public health systems, including NYC municipal hospitals and the Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system. Her doctoral training emphasized multicultural orientation and the ethical responsibility of clinicians to understand how culture, power, and social location shape psychological experience.
She has presented at national conferences and written in textbooks and journals on multicultural and social justice issues in psychotherapy and previously served as Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Officer for APA Division 36. These experiences inform the way she approaches therapy today—with careful attention to multicultural identity, family systems, migration history, faith traditions, and the broader social realities that shape each person’s life.
Cultural context is not treated as background information, but as integral to understanding suffering, resilience, and growth.
Before training as a psychologist, Dr. Kim worked in management consulting and equity research, earning national recognition for her analytic work during the 2008 financial crisis. This experience gives her a lived understanding of performance pressure, burnout, and the quiet questions that emerge when success no longer feels sufficient.
Today, she brings both psychological depth and practical insight into the inner lives of high-performing professionals navigating identity, purpose, and direction.
Dr. Kim is co-author of Existential-Spiritual Psychotherapy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Her academic work engages the intersection of psychotherapy, spirituality, and multicultural awareness, contributing to interdisciplinary dialogue across psychology, philosophy, and religious studies.
She has authored textbook chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles and has held leadership roles within various Divisions of the American Psychological Association. Her scholarship continues to inform both her clinical practice and the broader development of the ESP framework.