Beach Therapy: Walk-and-Talk Therapy in Huntington Beach.

The Huntington Beach shoreline stretches south from the pier along a wide, flat strand. It is a public beach, which means there are other people on it — families, dog walkers, people running, people sitting. That is worth naming plainly, because it is a real feature of this setting, not a minor detail.

Before our first beach session, we have a direct conversation about what privacy looks like here and what its limits are. We agree in advance on a simple, unremarkable signal — a turn of phrase, a small gesture — for when someone approaches closely enough that you want to pause. People pass us constantly and pay us no attention. Two people walking and talking near the water is among the most ordinary sights on any Southern California beach. That said, I cannot promise the shoreline will feel as private as a closed office door, because it will not. If a session needs that level of containment, we use the office.

Confidentiality outdoors is an ethical and clinical matter, not just a logistics one. By choosing to hold sessions on a public beach, you are also accepting that someone who knows you could see us together — and that I cannot control the sound of the waves relative to a conversation passing by. We talk through all of this before we begin, and you can change your mind about the setting at any point.

The stretch south of the pier tends to be less crowded than the area directly around it. In the early morning on weekdays, and through most of the autumn and winter months, the beach is genuinely quiet. We generally aim for times that give us the most room. The flat, hard-packed sand near the waterline makes for easy walking at any pace.

Walk-and-talk therapy is a young area of formal research. The honest version of what the evidence shows is this: some things are well-established, some things are promising but preliminary, and some of the reasoning is more clinical and experiential than it is proven by controlled trials. All three of those are true at once, and it is worth saying so directly.

Exercise and mood are well-established ground. The relationship between physical activity and reduced depression and anxiety symptoms is one of the most replicated findings in mental health research. A 2026 umbrella review synthesizing over 1,000 component studies found that aerobic exercise reduced depression symptoms with a moderate effect, and anxiety symptoms with a small-to-moderate effect, across clinical and non-clinical populations and all adult age groups. Walking specifically — not intense exercise, just walking — is included in that evidence base. This is sturdy, replicated science.

The relationship between water and wellbeing is promising but less settled. The study of “blue space” — coastal and water environments — and mental health is a newer and smaller literature. Cross-national research involving tens of thousands of participants has found that people who live near the coast and people who visit coastal or water environments regularly tend to report lower psychological distress and greater wellbeing than those who do not. These associations hold after controlling for physical activity levels, which suggests that proximity to water may have some benefit beyond the movement alone. What those mechanisms are — whether it is the visual quality of the horizon, the sound of waves, the shift in attention that water tends to invite — remains an active question. The research is consistent in direction, but the field’s own reviewers are clear that the evidence base is still heterogeneous and the comparisons between different types of blue space are limited.

Walk-and-talk therapy specifically has only one small randomized trial to its name so far. A 2025 pilot study published in a peer-reviewed journal randomized 37 men with mild-to-moderate depression to either walk-and-talk therapy or conventional indoor therapy over six weekly sessions. Both groups improved. The walk-and-talk group showed larger improvements on anxiety and stress measures. The study’s authors concluded that the approach appears acceptable and potentially advantageous, and they called for a larger powered trial to confirm the findings. That is honest about where the science is: one small pilot, with promising signals, requiring replication.

Bilateral and rhythmic movement as a nervous-system regulator is a working hypothesis in somatic practice, not a proven mechanism. Walking is rhythmic and bilateral — the alternating movement of left and right sides of the body. This is one of the rationales behind EMDR’s side-to-side eye movements, and it features in somatic frameworks, including the work of Peter Levine, as a way the body can discharge stored activation rather than hold it frozen. Practitioners and clients consistently report that walking helps something release. Whether the bilateral rhythm is the active ingredient, or whether it is the movement itself, or the context, or the therapeutic relationship, or all of these together, is not cleanly separable with current research. The hypothesis is clinically plausible and widely used. It is not yet proven.

My own clinical experience. I offer that too, for what it is worth as evidence: which is something, but not the same thing as a controlled trial. The clients who are most drawn to beach therapy often describe the office setting itself as part of what makes honesty hard — the face-to-face arrangement, the quiet, the containment. On the shoreline, things move. Not always faster, not always easier, but differently — and for some people, differently is what has been missing. I trust that clinical observation, and I hold it alongside the honest limits of what the research currently says.

Beach therapy is not the right setting for every person or every moment of the work.

If a session calls for the kind of deep eyes-closed resourcing work we do in CRM — where I need to guide you carefully through internal imagery while tracking your body responses closely — the office serves that work far better than an open, public shoreline. The same is true of couples sessions, which I hold only at the Irvine office or by telehealth; the logistics and relational dynamics of beach sessions are not suited to that format.

If you are in acute crisis, the beach is not the right place. Crisis work needs containment, access to support, and full clinical attention without the variables of a public outdoor setting. We would use the office or telehealth and make a clear plan before any beach session resumed.

Some people simply find that the openness of the shoreline — the exposure, the public nature of it, the awareness of being seen — adds a layer of vigilance that outweighs whatever the movement and water offer. If that is you, that is genuinely useful information about your nervous system, not a failure. We will work where your body can settle.

And on days when the weather makes it unpleasant enough to be distracting, we move inside without ceremony.