Niki Payne, LMFT | Coastwise Health

Niki helps high-achieving professionals, entrepreneurs, and couples build what she calls relational self-leadership, the clarity and self-trust to show up more fully in their relationships, careers, and lives without losing themselves in the process.

Areas of focus

Anxiety and relationship OCD (ROCD)
Relationship issues and self-esteem
Betrayal trauma and recovery from narcissistic abuse
Premarital work and relationship tune-ups
Life transitions: college, career change, marriage, family planning, and midlife
Entrepreneurs, medical professionals, and creative professionals

Ask if Niki is the right fit

What it is like to work with Niki

Niki's style is warm, direct, and often laced with humor. She describes part of her role as holding up a mirror, gently but honestly reflecting the patterns that may be keeping a client stuck.

A natural systems thinker, she blends humanistic and psychodynamic frameworks with practical, evidence-based tools, including CBT, DBT, ACT, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Motivational Interviewing, the Gottman Method, and Imago Relationship Therapy.

As a certified clinical hypnotherapist, she can also incorporate hypnosis and guided imagery when appropriate to a client's goals.

At the center of her work is the idea of relational self-leadership: learning to lead yourself with greater clarity, self-awareness, and compassion so you can build more fulfilling relationships with the people around you.

An unconventional path

Niki's path into therapy was not a straight line. She spent nearly seven years as a dating and relationships columnist for a national online publication, writing about modern dating culture and the gap between how people think and feel in relationships.

When the publication closed, she built a coaching practice and later trained in clinical hypnotherapy, which she has practiced since 2017.

A period of profound personal loss, and her own difficulty finding a therapist who truly understood what she was experiencing, ultimately became the catalyst for pursuing her clinical license. Rather than go without support, she became her own resource, and that experience continues to influence the way she helps others develop greater self-trust.

Niki earned her Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology, specializing in Marriage and Family Therapy, from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology and has practiced psychotherapy since 2020.

You don't have to be in crisis to benefit from therapy. Sometimes therapy isn't about having problems. It is about having goals. The most successful people in every field surround themselves with trusted advisors, and I believe your emotional and relational life deserves that same level of investment.Niki Payne, LMFT

Wondering if Niki is the right fit?

Tell us what is going on and we will say honestly whether Niki is the right clinician for it, or point you to someone who is.

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