Pasadena Therapist

When working with adults who have experienced trauma, I initially seek to establish safety, grounding and greater body awareness. My mission is to assist clients in the process of restoring intrinsic healing resources and trust in their body. My trauma treatment approach is rooted in the methodology or EMDR and the Hakomi principles of organicity, nonviolence, unity, body/mind/spirit holism, and mindfulness.

You can heal and overcome trauma’s paralyzing grip on your life. It is possible to release habitual patterns that keep you living in the past.

Trauma stems from real and/or perceived life-threatening experiences that leave you feeling out of control, overwhelmed and powerless. The degree to which you register the trauma is determined by your subjective experience of the threat. The more helpless, vulnerable and unprepared you feel during the time it occurred, the more likely you will be traumatized.

Trauma is registered in the mind and body. In traumatic events, our body’s nervous system creates an enormous surge of energy to either fight or take flight. When our body is not able to carry out its desired action plan, unresolved physical and emotional tension from the event become stuck in the body. Muscular tension sits in the body, stagnates and wears on the nervous system. When the desired action plan at the time of the trauma is not integrated or processed through the body, we continue to unconsciously experience the terror as if the trauma were still occurring in present time.