About Dr. Vuthy Ou
After several years in the arts, I turned to psychology as a way to engage with the world in a more directly prosocial way. I earned a Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Widener University. I was awarded the Clinical Psychology Award for Empathy and Caring from the Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology for the "exceptional ability to forge constructive relationships with clients."
In addition to providing psychotherapy in inpatient, adult outpatient, substance use, and college counseling settings, my experience includes personality and neuropsychological assessment, executive coaching, leadership and organizational consultation, and clinical consultation and supervision.
Who I Work With
I work with adults who live with depression, anxiety, trauma/PTSD, histories of complicated childhoods, and different kinds of addictions. I also work with a number of people who might not meet criteria for a diagnosis, but still would like to change the way they experience self-esteem, perfectionism, shame and guilt, their relationships (as partner, parent, child, sibling, friend), identity exploration, spiritual issues, difficulties or stagnation at work, or dissatisfaction despite "achieving success."
While I see a wide range of people, I am particularly comfortable working with people with multiracial/multicultural families or relationships, people of Asian descent, immigrants or the adult children of immigrants, artists, graduate students and post-doctoral clinicians, and people who have experienced shifts in class and/or religious identity.
Services
How I Work
I work from an ecological, social, and relational psychoanalytic framework, which means that I believe that we do not fully know ourselves. We may not be fully aware of the ways that our early relationships can color, highlight, hide, or even distort - in unique and particular ways - how we perceive and interact with the world.
What is also often unconscious are the ways that large ecological, historical, economical, and social events and forces shape us and our experience, both through our own living experience of them and our inheriting these sometimes traumatic experiences across generations.
While it's important and worthwhile to improve upon what our minds already know about ourselves, the unconscious is hard to apprehend, hard to "act logically" upon, and hard to put into language. These forces most often reveal themselves through our embodied sense of emotions, how we relate to other people, our actions, those times we feel out of control, and the things we selectively don't pay attention to.
Professional Affiliations
American Psychological Association (APA)
APA Division 24 - Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
APA Division 34 - Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology
APA Division 39 - Society for Psychoanalysis
Philadelphia Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology