Abbey Vince

Abbey Vince is a Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist practicing at Abbey Rose Therapy in Redondo Beach, working in person in the South Bay and by telehealth across California with individuals, couples, and families ages 5 and up. Her specialties are big-feeling kids, athletes, and trauma, and each of those comes from somewhere specific. Abbey started competing in triathlons at nine and competed nationally for fifteen years until an injury forced a stop and a rethink; she has been an Ocean Lifeguard with the Long Beach Fire Department since 2018 and joined LA County Fire in 2022, and she still competes in surf lifesaving at the national and international level. Her own framing of the athlete work is that it comes from lived experience rather than textbooks alone.

Her approach is narrative and humanistic at its core — the problem is the problem, the person is not the problem — with EMDR and cognitive behavioral tools alongside. Abbey describes her style as direct and challenging: therapy should feel human rather than like one more place where you have to perform or have everything figured out, and she would rather ask the hard question than put someone in a box. As a relational therapist she focuses on the dynamics between people, not only within them, so that healing can happen in the relationships that matter most.

With children and teens, Abbey helps kids understand, express, and cope with strong emotions like anger, sadness, and anxiety, using play, art, and creative activities and bringing parents and caregivers into the room when it is safe and appropriate. With athletes she works with young competitors balancing sport and school, collegiate and professional athletes under performance stress, injured athletes facing recovery and identity shifts, and retired athletes looking for a new direction. Her trauma work covers PTSD and complex PTSD, childhood and developmental trauma, sexual abuse and assault recovery, domestic violence, grief, and sports-related trauma, and she offers EMDR for processing critical incidents and injuries without reliving every detail.

Alongside those core areas Abbey works with addiction and recovery — early recovery, step-down from inpatient or IOP care, adult children of alcoholics, and the partners and family members affected — with a relational, trauma-informed, harm-reduction-when-safe approach informed by her own experience as the adult child of parents in recovery and her work at an intensive outpatient program. She sees couples and families, works with first responders as one herself, and supports clients through life transitions. Ocean therapy is her own format: surfing, beach walks, hiking, or paddleboarding while talking, on a weekly rhythm with an office session for every one to three outdoor sessions, for people who find it hard to open up in a conventional room.

Abbey earned a Bachelor’s in Psychology at American University and a Master of Arts in Marital and Family Therapy at Alliant International University in 2024, and trained at the California Family Institute in Costa Mesa. She is registered with the California Board of Behavioral Sciences as an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, #150197, under the supervision of Taylor Elyse Addison, LMFT #130177. Sessions are 45 minutes: $175 for individuals, $200 for couples or families, and $225 for ocean sessions, with a limited number of sliding-scale spots and monthly superbills for out-of-network reimbursement.