Heal attachment, relational, and developmental trauma. Find the freedom to move on from your past.
Grounded in safety.
Oriented toward agency.
You don’t have to hold this alone.
In person trauma therapy in San Francisco
Often what heals trauma is a reparative relationship where you can feel safe to:
A trauma therapist can help you process difficult emotions and restore a sense of safety after experiences that leave lasting imprints on body, mind, and spirit.
Types of trauma include:
Need to zoom out? Return home to orient.
For many people, relational trauma is a response to a deep sense of betrayal — particularly when trust is ruptured through an affair.
Such betrayal disrupts not only a relationship, but a worldview — eroding confidence in your own perceptions (“How did I not see this?”) and sense of reality, reshaping how you move through the world, and placing exaggerated focus on one person’s behavior in a way that can unsettle your wider constellation of relationships.
This kind of betrayal is not just relational but epistemic, constituting an injury to knowing itself — one that can radiate outward into social belonging, everyday self-trust, and your basic orientation in the world.
Healing is, in part, re-learning how to know things for sure.
Affair recovery focuses on restoring your ability to trust yourself, find your way home to a place that feels stable and grounded, and re-engage with a world that may have begun to feel uncertain or suspect.
If you find yourself second-guessing your perceptions, caught in obsessive loops, or burdened by questions that only lead to more questions, you’re welcome to reach out.
Emotionally abusive relationships often follow a familiar cycle of seduction, tension, escalation, violence, and repair — mirroring the same core dynamics as addiction.
In relationships where attachment becomes anxious or addictive, tension from unmet needs or conflicting desires builds to a fever pitch.
An argument erupts, the dynamic becomes explosive, and as soon as the energy is exhausted, sorrow and regret replaces the raging storm with a quiet rain.
In the absence of strong personal coping skills, it’s easy to become desperate for our partner to make it better — and when they eventually do, the thing that caused the pain becomes the only thing that makes it better. This deepens attachment, creates dependence, and only heightens anxiety or fear the next time tension builds.
If there is addiction in your relationship, learn more here.
The seductive allure of pleasure, the deeply human need for love and belonging, the irresistible feeling of being chosen as the sole focus of someone’s affection — these are the things we live for. You’re not alone if the undertow is more powerful than your ability to swim against the current.
When the need for power or control is the defining motivation for connection by one person, the relationship ceases to be about love, no matter how convincing the “love bombing.”
The cost of the relationship gets higher with each turn of the cycle. Every beginning risks the possibility for a more violent ending and deeper dependence; every self-abandonment betrays your trust in yourself; each sacrifice of values, like thieves ransacked the temple and left behind a pile of shame.
It’s a double bind. Leaving an abusive relationship takes all the self-love, confidence, and strength that the relationship has stolen. This is why isolation is such an effective strategy for disempowerment, and why a mirror that reflects unconditional love is the key that opens the cage.
If you are ashamed to admit that you have returned one to many times, and can no longer turn to friends or family members who have heard this story before, please find a good trauma therapist.
Every trauma survivor I have ever met has said, “I didn’t think it was trauma because it wasn’t as bad as…it could have been worse…it was partly my fault.”
Here’s a gentle reminder: trauma is defined by your perception of the experience, not some objective marker of “terrible.” Also worth remembering, the psychological marks of emotional or verbal abuse take far longer to heal than a bruise.
Let this be permission to experience your truth without disclaimer.
If this resonates with you, reach out. You do not have to navigate this alone.
Invitation to pause.
Take a breath.
Like, really, bathe your brain in oxygen and let your lungs expand.
Exhale.
Let’s pause here and check in.
How are you doing with this so far?
The information that follows contains a detailed list of symptoms that someone with unprocessed traumatic experiences or PTSD may encounter.
It’s a lot.
You don’t have to read this all at once (or ever) and you don’t have to understand what it all means. Some of the descriptions below are academic, some are visceral.
If you feel triggered or overwhelmed, here is permission to skip the psycho-ed and just send me a message.
Trauma therapy is a gradual unfolding that begins by establishing safety with resources, coping mechanisms and trust — at your pace. With lots of room to say, “I need to take a break. I can’t today.”
Avoidance, hypervigilance, startle response, emotional disregulation, flashbacks, difficulty sleeping, recurring nightmares, intrusive thoughts, isolation, depression and anxiety are all common symptoms of trauma that can lead a survivor to feel trapped and powerless, caged by an inability to fully engage in the present.
Acute trauma occurs after an individual has experienced or witnessed a life threatening event that is beyond their control. The definition of trauma is therefore highly unique, depending not on only the events but on the individual’s unique perception and experience of an event.
The traumatic experience most likely to develop into PTSD is relational or developmental trauma — the rupture that occurs when the foundation of our safety and trust is shattered is shattered in formative, intimate relationships. These are usually experiences that accumulate over time with our care givers and loved ones such as abuse, neglect, infidelity, and betrayal.
When a person with developmental trauma has also suffered from isolated instances of acute trauma such as natural disaster, terrorism, war or random act of violence, they are likely to suffer from complex PTSD, a cluster of symptoms that develops after prolonged or repeated exposure to traumatic events.
One of the most common symptoms of trauma is the repeated sense of reliving the experience as if it were happening in the present. Trauma therapy can help you put those experiences in the past by:
Trauma therapy can help you move through the paralyzing anxiety that keeps you trapped in the past, rediscover a sense of personal agency, and rewrite your story so you can move forward with your life.
I offer trauma therapy for empaths, artists and highly sensitive people in a safe and soothing space in the Mission near Dogpatch and Potrero Hill.
Check out Therapy FAQ to learn more about how therapy works.
Read more about Somatic Therapy or take the Archetype Quiz to find out which therapeutic approach is a fit for your personality.
Unresolved traumatic material is frequently triggered by seemingly innocuous cues, latent reminders of an event encoded by our memory in sensory information (colors, sounds, smells) or echoes of the event in words or body language.
The body has a preverbal ability to remember experiences and can hold information that has not been encoded in cognitive memory due to automatic psychological survival strategies such as dissociation and disembodiment.
Bringing awareness to your triggers can provide a greater sense of control over your experience. These body memories are also important access points that we can use in therapy to complete emotional processing and memory reconsolidation so you can find closure.
Violence originating from those we love and trust is the most difficult to heal from and the most confusing to make sense of.
Intimate partner violence, sexual abuse and child abuse can shatter a person’s sense of reality and their ability to trust in others.
If you’re seeking therapy specifically for sexual trauma, please visit this page on Trauma-Informed Sex Therapy for more focused information.
It is not uncommon for individuals who have been harmed by those closest to them to take on the blame for another’s actions and direct their mistrust or rage towards themselves — preserving their love for another by sacrificing their love for self.
Learning to find forgiveness and self-compassion for the shame you feel is the first and most painful part of the healing process. You don’t have to hold this suffering on your own.
I am a licensed trauma therapist in San Francisco offering expert treatment for complex PTSD for survivors of acute and developmental trauma throughout California.
Tending Psychic Wounds
The process of diving deep into the psyche — to release your authentic self from the grip of defense mechanisms and survival strategies originally designed to protect you — is, by nature, unsettling.
My intention as a trauma therapist is to hold a space that is empathic, secure and aligned with your personal goals, supporting a safe process that unfolds at your natural pace.
Schedule an appointment with me today to see if trauma therapy is the right fit for your healing journey.
My therapy office is located in the Mission District in the heart of San Francisco with easy access to:
I offer in person trauma therapy in San Francisco’s Mission District near the border of Potrero Hill and Mission Bay.
Online trauma therapy and hybrid options are available throughout California whether you live in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, or have the freedom to live and work remotely.
Step into the future you deserve.
The violence or harm that happened to you does not define you.