Briana Smith

Briana Smith is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the founder and clinical director of Be Seen Therapy, a telehealth practice serving young adults, adults, and older adults across California. She brings over a decade of experience working with at-risk populations to help individuals feel truly listened to, heard, validated, and seen.

Her clinical focus is trauma-informed, evidence-based therapy with a specialization in EMDR. The people she sits with are often survivors — of domestic violence, of sexual assault, of religious environments that did damage, of events that left a nervous system still braced years later. What she is listening for is not only the symptom in front of her but the deeper experience and pattern feeding it, because that is where change tends to hold.

Briana is an EMDR Certified Therapist and an EMDRIA Approved Consultant. Her approach integrates trauma-informed, client-centered care with solution-focused technique — work she describes as understanding the difference between what a client says and what they actually mean, then reaching the root of the problem while still moving toward the next practical step. Her style is direct and challenging. She also works with anxiety, depression, grief and loss, family dynamics, and relationship difficulty, and takes her practice's view of anger seriously: a normal emotion carrying a message, worth understanding and channeling rather than suppressing.

That range comes out of an unusually wide career. Her calling began at YMCA OZ as a Resident Supervisor working with at-risk youth in residential treatment, and her path since has run through crisis management, school-based mental health services, coalition work with domestic violence survivors, substance use treatment, and clinical director roles — including Assistant Clinical Director at Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment Center, with additional work at Lido Wellness Center and La Ventana Treatment Center. Having seen care across the whole continuum, from residential and crisis response through outpatient therapy, she reads complex trauma presentations with a clear sense of what each level of care can and cannot do.

Her work also extends to developing other clinicians. She supervises and mentors associate therapists working toward licensure, with an emphasis on strengthening clinical judgment, trauma-informed care, and confidence with complex presentations. She leads Be Seen Therapy's EMDR consultation groups and supports clinicians developing their EMDR skills from initial training through certification, and she has taught at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology, supervising emerging therapists and teaching foundational clinical skills.

Briana holds a B.A. in Therapeutic and Community Psychology and Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Point Loma Nazarene University, an M.A. in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis in Marriage and Family Therapy from Pepperdine University, and an M.A. in Education–School Counseling from Alliant International University. She is licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist in California, and all Be Seen Therapy sessions are conducted by telehealth. Ruby — her Rhodesian Ridgeback and Australian Cattle dog mix, and not, by the practice's own admission, a trained therapy dog — sometimes joins sessions anyway.