Daya Mirabai Deuskar

MSS, LSW

Practice Founder & Psychotherapist

pronouns: she/they

I am a marginalized trauma therapist who specializes in serving marginalized, adjacently marginalized, and otherwise radically inclusive clients.

I work with individuals, couples, and families across the lifecycle, starting in adolescence. I have primarily trained and worked in utilizing psychodynamically-, relationally-, and somatically-oriented approaches. I incorporate liberationist, critical theory, and post-positivist frameworks in the way I conceptualize each case.

My primary treatment philosophy revolves around the concept of “No Bad Parts” from Internal Family Systems Therapy, an evidence-based practice at the forefront of modernized complex trauma treatment created first developed by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz and his colleauges at the IFS Institute beginning in the 1980s.

In the IFS Model, each of us has a psyche made up of multiple Parts (sometimes referred to as roles, personas, alters, archetypes, or shadows by other philosophies and subcultures) that take on different functions in the way they impact our lives. Fundamentally, every single Part (no matter how much we might feel negatively towards it) has a positive, loving intention for ourselves. In our moments of greatest shame, embarrassment, regression, and relapse, we are not “bad.” We’re not “failures.” And we’re not “hopeless.” We are simply trapped in a dysfunctional survival pattern led by parts of pure and loving intentions for ourselves, but with dramatically misguided and extreme impacts. Oftentimes, these Parts of ourselves are yearning for compassion, connectedness, calmness, or curiosity. To instill more courage, confidence, creativity, and clarity into these Parts as they move forward, they need to be unburdened of the weight of experience and trauma they have held onto that leads them to methodically act out in the patterns they believe will help us.

My goal is to honor, explore, and heal the Parts of your psyche that may be trapped in a survival pattern that isn’t serving you, and bring them into new roles and modes of being— and ultimately to guide you towards the path of recognizing everything you need to grow, evolve, and heal is found within your truest, authentic inner Self. As we bring our focus into larger, relational contexts, I hope to help you stay rooted in more functional, harmonious relationships with the Parts of the people around you. I want you to feel embodied in your experience of both your own and others Parts as you engage with the inner workings of your psyche soul with greater awareness, reassurance, and cooperation than ever before.

Education & Experience

I studied clinical social work at Bryn Mawr College’s Graduate School of Social Work and Social Resource, working full-time in a variety of settings to support myself during study. I received extensive training in Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy from the IFS Institute and completed my Level 1 training (Cohort: Foresta #652) in January 2022. I have also completed a year of in-service training and field experience in the practice of Ecosystemic Structural Family Therapy (ESFT), a modern revision of Salvador Minucin’s Structural Family Therapy (SFT). I have previously lectured and trained mental health providers in providing gender-affirming mental healthcare and case management since 2020.

My past years of psychotherapy experience and training have been in dual-diagnosis substance use treatment for TGD (trans & gender diverse) populations, and providing family-based psychotherapy with caseloads specializing in neurodiverse, queer & trans, and first-generation immigrant families. Before working as a psychotherapist, I have been working broadly the helping professional roles since 2018, providing life coaching, gender-affirming vocology, DEI&B consulting, case management, pre-licensed K-12 music therapy services, and more.

I have also previously worked full-time as a music educator and professional singer, having toured across Europe and performing in Carnegie Hall, Marian Anderson Hall, Lincoln Center, and more. I thoroughly enjoy working with fellow creatives, performers, and classically-trained conservatory-style education “survivors.”

I am provisionally licensed in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (#SW142075) and am primarily supervised by Jessica Floresta, LCSW, CST-S (#CW020433). My practice is affiliated with The Philatherapy Network, a private practice incubator providing the necessary supervision and support to help aligned and qualified emerging psychotherapists to launch Act 76-compliant private practices in Pennsylvania.

Why the name “Higher Octave”?

I don’t know if there’s a singular answer to this. It works from a multitude of complementary and conflicting perspectives and lenses of analysis. There are 8 notes in a diatonic scale, that form an octave. Each higher octave resonates at exponentailly higher frequencies. Maybe the “higher octave” represents the upwards spiral of progress.

Maybe the number 8 is what’s actually important. There are 8 C’s in the pneumonic for remembering the Eight Qualities of Self Energy in Internal Family Systems Therapy. There is also the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path, leading to the release of the painful cycle of rebirth, samsara. In Kabbalistic Judaism’s numerology, the Zohar describes the number 8 as representing “perfection” and “new beginnings”— because on the eight day, G-d began again after resting on the seventh day.

Social Location Disclosures

For both ease of prospective clients identifying clinicians they feel aligned with due to shared identity as well as for acknowledging my positionality in relation to you:

Although I often use identity-first language when speaking casually— I don’t quite “identify” as these identities. They are my material realities.

I am a woman of queer and trans experience and a woman of color. I am of Mizrahi Jewish, Konkani Indian, and Portuguese Sephardic converso ancestry. I am a spiritual and religiously practicing Reconstructionist Jew of post-Zionist & anti-fascist orientation. I am chronically ill and partially (dis)abled. I am neurodivergent and have had access to a diagnosis of ADHD as an adult. I am a person in long-term substance use recovery. I am a survivor of childhood abuse and domestic violence. I accept my fatness as a sign of a natural and healthy body. I have used the terms “relational anarchist,” “relationship reconstructionist,” and “polyflexible” to describe my relationship style throughout my life— I choose to practice monogamy in my singular partnership and relationship anarchy within my chosen family.

I provide supervised mental health services to people living on unceded ancestral Indigenous lands of the Erielhonan (Erie), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Lenni-Lenape (Lenapehopking), Shawnee, Susquehannock, and Tuscarora nations, and the Honniasont, Saluda, Saponi, Tutelo, and Wenrohronon tribes— now colonized as the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

“We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand.

But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for G-d’s sake.

And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.”

- Robert McCammon