TRAUMA

Mind Body Healing

Trauma Therapy

Trauma can continue to shape how we feel and respond long after an experience has ended. You may understand intellectually that you are safe now, yet find that your body reacts as though something is still wrong. Certain situations may bring up intense anxiety, fear, shame, anger, or a desire to shut down or disconnect. You may find yourself avoiding things, feeling constantly on alert, or reacting in ways that don’t seem to match what is happening in the present.

These responses often make much more sense when we understand them as ways your mind and body learned to protect you.

Trauma therapy is not about forcing yourself to revisit painful experiences or simply talking about what happened over and over again. Our work begins by understanding how your experiences are affecting you now and helping you develop enough safety and stability to approach difficult material without becoming overwhelmed.

Over time, we can work with the memories, emotions, beliefs, and protective responses that may still be shaping your life. I integrate EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and somatic and polyvagal-informed approaches, tailoring the work to your needs and pace.

The goal is not to erase what happened. It is to help the past feel more like the past, so that it has less power over how you experience yourself, your relationships, and your life today.

Experience Treating Trauma

Trauma treatment has been a central part of my work for more than 20 years.

For nine and a half years, I worked at the UCLA Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center. I began as an on-call counselor, providing acute crisis support to survivors following sexual assault, and later worked as a psychotherapist providing longer-term trauma treatment.

That experience deeply shaped the way I work. I learned that trauma can affect far more than our memories of what happened. It can shape our sense of safety, our relationship with our bodies, our ability to trust ourselves and others, and the ways we respond when something in the present reminds us—consciously or unconsciously—of what we have experienced before.

My approach to trauma therapy is relational, collaborative, and paced carefully. We pay attention not only to the story of what happened, but to what happens inside you now. Depending on your needs, our work may include EMDR, IFS, somatic approaches, and tools for understanding and working with nervous-system responses.

You do not need to tell your entire story before you are ready, and there is no single way trauma therapy is supposed to unfold. We work at a pace that allows us to approach difficult experiences while also paying attention to what helps you feel grounded, present, and connected to yourself.

Healing does not mean forgetting what happened. It means having more freedom in how you live now.

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SEXUAL TRAUMA

Healing & Recovery

Sexual trauma can affect our sense of safety, our relationships, our bodies, and how we feel about ourselves. Survivors may experience anxiety, shame, difficulty trusting, feeling overwhelmed or shut down, or question whether what happened was “serious enough” to explain how they feel. There is no single way people respond to sexual trauma, and many of these responses are ways the mind and body have learned to cope with overwhelming experiences.

Experience in Sexual Trauma Treatment

I have extensive experience working with survivors of sexual assault and sexual trauma, including 10 years as a therapist at the UCLA Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center.I began there as an on-call counselor, providing crisis intervention and support in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault. I later worked as a psychotherapist with survivors navigating the longer-term effects of their experiences. Through years of specialized training, supervision, and clinical practice, sexual trauma treatment became a central part of my work as a therapist.

One of the things I learned during those years is how isolating sexual trauma can be. Survivors may question themselves, minimize what happened, compare their experience to someone else's, or wonder why they haven't been able to simply “move on.” Therapy can provide a place where those experiences can be understood without judgment and where healing does not have to happen alone.

A Collaborative Approach to Healing

Sexual trauma therapy does not require you to tell every detail of what happened, nor do I believe people should be pushed into processing experiences before they are ready.

We begin with what is affecting you now. That may include anxiety, shame, relationships, intimacy, boundaries, feeling disconnected from your body, or nervous-system responses that seem difficult to control. Together, we determine what feels most important and what kind of therapeutic work is appropriate for you.

My approach integrates EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic and polyvagal-informed therapy, mindfulness, and attachment-based work. Depending on your needs, therapy may involve working with traumatic memories, understanding protective responses, developing greater capacity for regulation, or addressing the ways past experiences continue to affect relationships and your sense of self.