Will Wang, LSW

I work with individuals and couples navigating identity, belonging, and relationship, often at the exact intersection where being Asian American complicates all three. Many of my clients have learned to hold several selves at once: the self their family expects, the self their culture expects, and the self underneath both that they've rarely had room to ask about. I work with people who are ready to stop translating themselves for everyone else and start understanding what they actually feel.

I treat cultural context as clinical information, not background noise. Rather than applying a generic framework and hoping it fits, I start from the assumption that a client's relationship to obligation, achievement, silence, or family loyalty was shaped somewhere specific, and that understanding where is often the fastest route to real change. My work draws primarily from relational cultural theory and psychodynamic therapy, with ACT and DBT tools brought in as needed. Sessions typically move from building tolerance for hard emotion toward examining the inherited patterns underneath it. With couples, this often means reframing conflict not as a breakdown but as one of the more honest forms of communication available to two people who were taught not to ask for too much.

I came to this work after years in demanding academic and corporate environments, which gave me a firsthand understanding of the exhaustion that can come with constantly performing competence, a dynamic I see often in Asian American clients navigating high pressure fields. As the child of Taiwanese and Korean immigrants, I'm conversational in Mandarin and Korean and can incorporate either into sessions when it helps a client feel more understood, even though I don't currently offer full sessions in either language.

I hold a Master's in Social Work from the University of Chicago, where I now also co-teach Asian American Mental Health. I received my Bachelor of Science in Economics and Bachelor of Arts in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania. I'm based in several locations across Chicago and see clients both in-person and via telehealth.

Office:

• Lakeview: 3139 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago, IL 60657
• Hyde Park: 6127 S University Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
• Ravenswood: 2650 W Montrose Ave, Chicago, IL 60618
• Andersonville: 1511 W Berwyn Ave, Chicago, IL 60640

Email: will@besttherapies.org

Website: https://www.psychologytoday.com/profile/1571389
 

Areas of Practice:

• Anxiety
• Identity
• Burnout
• Relationships
• Family Dynamics
• Intergenerational Trauma
• Depression

Language(s) Spoken

• English
• Mandarin Chinese
• Korean

Insurance Accepted

• BCBS PPO/POS
• Aetna PPO/POS