Dr. Ellice Kang, PhD

How Ellice came to this work

Dr. Kang is a second-generation Korean American, born and raised in Southern California. Her training and her own bicultural experience converge in the work — particularly with clients navigating the territory between two cultural systems, family-of-origin expectations, and the quiet pressure of being the first generation expected to translate emotional life into a vocabulary the previous generation didn’t have.

“My ultimate goal is to help foster positive change in the different areas of your life.” — Dr. Ellice Kang

Her doctoral training at Purdue University — a PhD in Counseling Psychology completed in 2024 with the dissertation Highlighting the Need for Culture-Specific Preventative Interventions — built an integrative framework: Interpersonal Therapy (IPT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), held together by systems theory. The structured cognitive work gives clients tools to interrupt anxious or depressive loops. The values-based ACT work gives them somewhere to spend their energy instead of fighting the symptom. The interpersonal layer locates the symptom in the relational and family system that produced it — rather than treating the symptom as a personal defect.

Dr. Kang’s clinical work centers on depression, anxiety, and identity development — including bicultural identity, racial identity, gender identity, and generational-status dynamics. She also works extensively with life transitions, grief and loss, interpersonal functioning, and intergenerational trauma. Her multicultural training shapes the entire frame of the work, not just a sub-specialty: she pays close attention to how culture, immigration history, and family-system expectations shape the way symptoms present and the way clients describe what’s wrong.

Alongside the clinical work, Dr. Kang has contributed to peer-reviewed counseling-psychology research on therapeutic process, working-alliance dynamics, cross-cultural therapy outcomes, and clinician cultural responsiveness. Published work includes Development and Initial Validation of the Therapist Hope for Clients Scale, Clients’ resilience and distress in psychotherapy, Clients’ perceptions of the working alliance as a predictor of increases in positive affect, A choir or cacophony?, Therapists’ cultural comfort and clients’ distress, and Therapist and counseling center effects on international students’ counseling outcome.

A particular emphasis of her practice is reducing the stigma that often surrounds mental health in cultural communities where therapy is still framed as a sign of weakness or family failure. For many clients, particularly BIPOC clients, the act of starting therapy is itself a culturally weighted decision — one that benefits from a clinician who understands the weight without needing it explained.

At Gryzbek Therapy, Dr. Kang sees adults and adolescents across anxiety, depression, trauma, postpartum mental health, women’s issues, LGBTQ+ identity work, grief, and stress — with the multicultural and identity layer running underneath whichever presenting concern brings a client in. She is currently accepting new clients for both in-person sessions in Naperville and Illinois telehealth.