Many people arrive at An Bulkens’s door carrying a version of the same quiet exhaustion: old patterns that keep reasserting themselves, relationships that feel more distant than they want, or a child whose struggles at home or school have the whole family on edge. An is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in Chico, California, with more than twenty years of clinical experience helping children, adolescents, adults, and families work through these kinds of entanglements — including anxiety, grief, anger, family conflict, and the long shadows of abuse or neglect.
Her work with children centers on finding the root of what a child is expressing through their behavior, moving at a pace that respects their natural development rather than rushing toward surface-level relief. For adults, she draws on the tradition of Lacanian Psychoanalysis — a rigorous, European-rooted approach that is less about symptom management and more about lasting change in how a person lives, loves, and works. It offers particular hope for those who have tried therapy before and found the benefits faded quickly, or for someone who notices they can’t put work down even at the dinner table, that the boundary between “on” and “off” has quietly disappeared.
Trained as a Clinical Psychologist at the University of Ghent and holding an MA in Counseling Psychology from the Wright Institute, An offers in-person sessions in Chico and works with clients online as well.