Leyla Aylin Kuntsal
The work beneath
the work.
What maturation and intimacy really require—
and how some of our most cherished ideas about healing and healthy relationships
can undermine both.
Emotional maturity and real intimacy look different than we've been taught
and is much more liberating.
What happens when
you’re very good at
the work?
All the self-exploration, healing + therapy matters. It got us here.
And we’re human. Sometimes all the good we’ve learned—even our greatest capacities—can unknowingly perpetuate the very things we’re trying to outgrow.
Sometimes psychological sophistication gives us more sophisticated ways to leave ourselves.
Let's take all that hard-won complexity,
and return to the simple.
Who I Work With
While Leyla has an uncommon depth and clarity, and often catches what many miss, she also has a ton of affection for all the really human things we do.
Even the less flattering discoveries we make about ourselves can become things to laugh about, join together in and even celebrate, because we’re getting real! Making it much easier to face and embody ourselves even more honestly.
Alison Siggelkow, Psychotherapist, NY + CA
THE UNGLAMOROUS BUT LIBERATING WORK OF
A MORE UNSHAKEABLE INNER OKAYNESS
To build and inhabit a deep reservoir of okayness—even when things are not okay.
Less easily lost to other people or external forces.
Less thrown off by other people's limits.
More able to stay warm and with ourselves, and full of agency.
SELF-OWNERSHIP
To uncover and stand in our embodied experience.
To orient toward and strengthen our own center.
To find what is simple, clean, and self-owned beneath the noise, and connect to self and others from there.
RELATIONAL ADULTHOOD
Centered enough to actually encounter another person as they are
—their limits, differences and separateness—
and remain free and even more connected inside real intimacy.
A little about me
I’ve learned this territory from the inside out, professionally and personally, for over two decades.
And I’ve been working with self-aware folks and therapists for a decade.
What I care about is simple →
less unnecessary suffering, more freedom and connection.
What my work does →
gets underneath our ideas about freedom and connection to what they actually require—the subtle, granular places so easily missed, and misunderstood, even in the therapy and self-growth worlds.
How we get there →
I like to laugh and link arms along the way, in this funny, tricky business of being human. I'm right there in it, too.
I see high functioning clients from anywhere in the world, in a non-therapy capacity. More about me and my past practicing psychotherapy here
