Trauma & PTSD Therapy in Los Angeles & Pasadena, CA

You Don’t Have to Keep Living in Survival Mode

Trauma has a way of staying in the body long after the event has passed. You might find yourself on edge without knowing why, pulling away from people you love, or feeling like no matter how hard you try, you can’t fully relax or feel safe. These aren’t signs that something is permanently wrong with you. They’re signs that your nervous system learned to protect you — and now it needs support to do something different.

Who I Work With

The clients who arrive for trauma therapy aren't always sure that's what they're here for. Some come in with a clear story they want to address. Others come because something feels off and they don't yet have language for why. Both are starting places. The clients I see in trauma work include:

Adults carrying childhood trauma or family-of-origin material. Neglect, emotional unavailability, households where you couldn't fully relax, parents who were physically present but emotionally elsewhere. This kind of trauma often doesn't have a single date attached to it — it accumulated, year by year, in the small moments where you learned what wasn't safe to bring into the room.

Survivors of sexual trauma. Whether the experience was recent or decades ago, whether you've talked about it before or never named it out loud, the work moves at your pace. The body-based and reprocessing approaches I use don't require detailed verbal recounting — the goal is to help your nervous system finally know that the danger is over.

Survivors of single-incident trauma. Car accidents, assaults, medical events, sudden losses, witnessing violence. Something happened, and you've been a different version of yourself since. Single-incident trauma often responds well to focused work, sometimes in fewer sessions than people expect.

People recovering from abusive or controlling relationships. Romantic partnerships, family systems, religious communities, workplaces. The trauma of being chronically diminished, gaslit, or controlled often takes longer to recognize than it took to live through. Rebuilding a sense of self after these dynamics is its own form of trauma work.

People with medical trauma or chronic illness. Diagnoses, hospitalizations, invasive procedures, the harder-to-name experience of living in a body that hasn't felt safe. Medical trauma is one of the most under-recognized forms of PTSD, and one of the most responsive to integrated trauma therapy.

People grieving complicated or traumatic loss. Sudden deaths, suicides, losses entangled with regret or unfinished business, deaths that the people around you don't seem to understand. Grief itself isn't pathology — but grief that loops, that gets stuck, that can't move because of what's wrapped around it, often softens with trauma-informed support.

Healthcare workers, first responders, and caregiving professionals. People who've spent years absorbing other people's worst moments. Vicarious trauma and burnout are real, well-documented, and rarely well-treated by general therapists. The work here is both about your own material and about reclaiming a relationship with a profession that once meant something to you.

LGBTQ+ clients carrying identity-based trauma. The accumulated weight of living queer or trans in environments that weren't built for you — minority stress, internalized shame, family rupture, religious harm — often shows up in the nervous system long after the events themselves. Affirming trauma work holds space for this without requiring you to translate or explain.

People who've done other therapy and feel stuck. You understand your patterns. You can name what happened. You've talked it through, sometimes for years. And the weight hasn't lifted. Trauma-focused work — particularly the body-based and reprocessing modalities — often reaches what insight alone hasn't.

Entertainment Industry Professionals. Actors, writers, crew, and creatives carrying both industry-specific trauma — the strikes, contract instability, public scrutiny, the exhaustion of constant rejection — and the personal histories that brought them to a profession this demanding in the first place.

Complex Trauma & C-PTSD

Complex PTSD develops differently than the PTSD most people picture. Rather than forming around a single overwhelming event, it accumulates — through years of ongoing difficulty, chronic stress, or relationships in which safety and care were inconsistent at best. The wounds layer over one another until the nervous system stops distinguishing between past and present, and the patterns that helped you survive become the patterns running your adult life.

Complex trauma is one of the central focuses of this practice. Many of the clients I see haven't experienced one defining event — they've experienced years of conditions that taught them, often before they had words for it, that the world wasn't fully safe and they couldn't fully relax. The work isn't quick, but it's possible. And it's some of the most meaningful work I do.

How Complex Trauma Shows Up

The signs of C-PTSD overlap with PTSD but extend further into identity, self-concept, and relational patterns. Common presentations include:

• A chronic sense of shame, defectiveness, or being fundamentally unlovable

• Difficulty trusting others, even people who have demonstrated trustworthiness

• Emotional flooding or numbing, often unpredictably

• Feeling disconnected from yourself, your body, or your emotions

• Repeating relationship patterns that mirror earlier dynamics

• A nervous system stuck in chronic vigilance or shutdown

• Difficulty knowing what you actually feel, want, or need

• A persistent sense that other people seem to operate from a manual you didn't get

These responses aren't pathology in the simple sense. They're what your nervous system did with what it had. The work in therapy is to give it newer, better information.

Specific Forms of Complex Trauma I Work With

Childhood Emotional Neglect

Often invisible from the outside, emotional neglect leaves a particular kind of imprint: a sense that your inner world doesn't quite exist, that your emotions are inconvenient or excessive, that you should be able to handle things on your own. Many adults with childhood emotional neglect describe their childhoods as "fine" — and don't realize until later how much was missing.

Developmental and Attachment Trauma

When the people who were supposed to be safe weren't reliably safe, the nervous system organizes around that early. Anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and disorganized attachment patterns are the long shadow of relational trauma — and they're treatable. Attachment-focused therapy is built specifically for this work.

Childhood Abuse and Family-of-Origin Trauma

Physical, emotional, sexual, or psychological abuse during the years your sense of self was forming. The work here moves slowly and carefully, often through EMDR and parts work, in a sequence that builds internal safety before approaching the harder material.

Religious and High-Control Group Trauma

Growing up in religious or high-control environments where shame, fear, and conformity were used as tools of control. Religious trauma often shows up tangled with identity, sexuality, family relationships, and self-worth — and untangling those threads is its own form of complex trauma work.

Identity-Based Trauma

The accumulated weight of living in a body, identity, or community that's been targeted, marginalized, or made invisible. For LGBTQ+ clients, people of color, immigrants, religious minorities, and people with disabilities, this category of trauma is real, well-documented, and frequently missed by therapists who weren't trained to see it.

Intimate Partner Abuse and Coercive Control

Trauma from romantic relationships marked by physical violence, emotional abuse, gaslighting, financial control, or sustained psychological manipulation. Recovery often involves rebuilding trust in your own perception — a process the abusive dynamic was specifically designed to dismantle.

Medical Trauma

Chronic illness, traumatic diagnoses, invasive procedures, hospitalizations, and the broader experience of living in a body that hasn't felt safe. Medical trauma is one of the most under-recognized forms of PTSD, and one of the most responsive to integrated body-based and reprocessing work.

Cumulative Workplace and Vicarious Trauma

Healthcare workers, first responders, social workers, journalists, lawyers in trauma-adjacent practice areas, and others whose professions involve sustained exposure to other people's worst moments. The trauma here is real even when the events weren't yours — and the standard "self-care" framing rarely reaches it.

Why Complex Trauma Needs a Different Approach

Single-incident trauma protocols often don't work — or don't work well — for complex trauma. The nervous system has too much to address all at once, and protective parts get activated that shut the work down before it can move. The approach I take builds the foundation first: stabilization, resourcing, internal safety, and a working alliance strong enough to hold the harder material when we eventually get there.

This often means combining modalities — EMDR for reprocessing, IFS for working with parts, somatic integration for the body's piece, attachment-focused work for the relational layer. No single technique reaches all of complex trauma. The integration is the point.

If you've done years of therapy and still feel stuck, if you've been told you're "treatment-resistant," if you've worked with therapists who tried to push too fast or too slow — complex trauma work done well looks different. It moves at the pace your nervous system can handle. And it goes the distance.