RIA RAJKARNIKAR ESCOBER, ALMFT
Associate Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist,
SHE/THEY
Ria Rajkarnikar Escober is an Associate Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (IL license #208.011640) providing individual, couples, and family therapy. She earned her Master's in Marriage and Family Therapy and Psychometrics from the University of Louisiana Monroe, bringing a clinically rigorous and deeply human approach to her work with individuals, couples, families, and adolescents. Ria provides therapy in both English and Nepali.
Ria grew up in Nepal, in a world where emotions were rarely named, they were lived. Coming to the United States meant renegotiating everything she had known about connection, belonging, and identity, and learning to carry grief that didn't have a name in either language. She became a therapist because she knew what it felt like to need someone who could hold that complexity without trying to simplify it. That experience is what brought her to this work, and it's what keeps her here.
As a queer immigrant woman of color and systemic thinker, Ria is most naturally drawn to people who exist at the margins; those navigating the intersections of identity, culture, trauma, and relationships across multiple worlds at once. Her clinical interests include intergenerational trauma, identity development, immigration and acculturation stress, relational conflict, and the particular grief of carrying experiences that don't translate cleanly into any single language, diagnosis, or story. Deeply committed to affirming, accessible care for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ clients, immigrants and first-generation Americans, and anyone whose life exists at intersections that most therapists ask you to simplify, Ria doesn't need these experiences translated into clinical language. They already live in how she shows up.
Ria's therapeutic approach draws from Narrative Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Bowenian and contextual family systems theory, and experiential approaches. In practice, this means she might invite you to externalize what feels like a personal failing, to separate it from who you are and examine it with some distance. She might help you retell your story and recover the moments that got left out, the ones that tell a truer version. She might map the patterns that have moved through your family across generations, exploring the loyalties and legacies you inherited without choosing. Or she might sit with the parts of you that have been carrying something heavy for far too long and help them set it down. And sometimes the most important work happens right in the room. In what surfaces between you, in what the body already knows before the words arrive.
As a queer woman of color with deep roots in a culture that pathologizes neither complexity nor contradiction, Ria is committed to providing affirming, accessible care for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ clients, immigrants and first-generation Americans, and those navigating lives that don't fit neatly into a single story or a single world. She doesn't need these experiences translated into clinical language. They already live in how she shows up.
Outside the therapy room, Ria is a spouse, a cat mom to two very chaotic little creatures, and someone who is almost always either baking something, listening to music, or getting happily lost somewhere new.
