Empowerment center
good nature
LGBTQIA+ Affirmative Trauma Therapy
in Agoura Hills, Los Angeles
The weight of all the challenges you’ve faced in life has been incredibly heavy.
You’ve been trying your best to get by but a lot of times it seems like your mind and body are working against you.
- Feeling like anxiety and/or depression is just your “default setting”
- It being intolerable to be unliked or have someone mad at you- people pleasing or striving for perfection are common for you
- Not being able to be mentally or emotionally present: you may be feeling like you are living on autopilot or your attention is always scattered
- Being stuck in survival mode: you find yourself making choices that you wouldn’t be making if life was more stable for you
- Keeping yourself busy and juggling so much because you know you’ll have to feel your feelings if you slow down
- Desperation to just be yourself in an environment that’s thriving off of your self suppression
- Grief, rage and/or overwhelm at the state of the world when all you want is inclusivity and safety for all
That’s already a lot. I can imagine if you are here, you might have checked off multiple (if not all) the boxes above. To complicate things further, it seems like the people in your life don’t really understand just how much this is effecting you. It’s hard enough to go through all of these challenging experiences, but the loneliness of not having what you went through fully understood is just as tough.
You may be enjoying pieces of your life, but at the core you feel this sense of disconnection from your life. It’s hard to be present in your various relationships throughout your life, working is just weighing you down further, and trying to figure out self care in the midst of all of this just seems unattainable most days.
You just wish things didn’t seem so hard all the time.
How Trauma Therapy Can Help
Whether or not the tough experiences in your past actually “clinically count” as trauma, we can help you to explore how your personal and generational history has shaped you.
However the trauma is showing up symptom wise, trauma therapy helps the nervous system to learn that the traumatic event is over so that the nervous system can settle and let go of a wide range of symptoms.
Healing from trauma or other equally challenging experiences can look like:
We can support you in getting to the root of the internal processes that are holding you back so that you can move forward with more clarity and confidence.
- Rewiring your negative core beliefs
- Releasing self-judgment with greater self understanding
- Helping you to better access your emotions and feel them safely
- Reconnecting you with your body and gut instincts
- Empowering you to assertively navigate your life
To help you explore and heal from your trauma...
We utilize three trauma informed modalities between the two of us: Compassionate Inquiry, EMDR, and Internal Family Systems.
All three of these modalities can help you access memories or parts of yourself that you haven’t been able to access consciously.
Being able to access typically unconscious information in your nervous system allows for a deeper healing experience.
Sources of Trauma We support With
- Relational Trauma: trauma that happens within connections to other people, particularly our parents/caregivers
- Trauma from Abuse: physical, emotion, psychological, sexual, financial abuse
- Trauma from neglect: physical, emotional neglect
- Religious Trauma: trauma stemming from abusive or harmful religious environments
- Chronic Traumas: including items like growing up in poverty, being surrounded by ongoing domestic or community violence, ongoing exposure to discrimination
- Single Incident Trauma: including accidents, surviving a natural disaster, assaults
Let’s get started on your healing journey.
Your trauma doesn’t have to control your life anymore.
book a free consultation →
Frequently asked questions
“Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.”
-Dr Gabor Maté
Trauma is an internal process where the body is stuck in a survival response, such as a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. When trauma is present, the nervous system has not “gotten the memo” that the trauma- inducing event is over, and is still activated as if the traumatic event is still occurring. This trauma can rear its head in various ways, from a “typical” PTSD-eque experience of hypervigilance and sensitivity around reminders of the trauma, to a whole slew of mental health experiences that are many times seen as clinically distinct from trauma. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, people pleasing, perfectionism, substance use, low self esteem, relationship challenges and more can have their root in unresolved trauma.
Compassionate Inquiry (CI) is a dynamic somatic approach to therapy based on the work of Dr. Gabor Maté. This approach helps get to the root of mental health concerns by exploring how our current distressing perceptions are connected to unprocessed trauma stored in the body, and how childhood wounding continues to show up in our adult life. CI is influenced by other major therapy modalities and psychological theories, including but not limited to: Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems, Attachment Theory, Polyvagal Theory, and Interpersonal Neurobiology.
Both Angela and Rae are fully trained in CI and offer CI sessions.
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a type of therapy used to help people heal from trauma and PTSD symptoms by focusing on traumatic memories while using bilateral stimulation (usually through eye movements or tapping). The use of bilateral stimulation accesses a part of the brain that cannot typically be accessed through traditional talk therapy. EMDR can reduce vividness of the traumatic memories being reprocessed.
Rae offers EMDR sessions and is fully trained through the Institute for Creative Mindfulness.
Internal Family Systems (IFS), also known as parts work, is a therapy modality that moves away from the idea of "mono-mind", or the idea that the mind is just one entity. Instead, IFS sees our nervous systems as dynamic systems that hold multiple subpersonalities, or parts, that each have their own unique qualities and needs. Some examples of parts include professional parts, inner children, parts that seek substances for relief, the inner critic, and people pleasing parts. IFS can help reduce internal conflict (such as a conflict between a part that still wants to get high and a part that wants to get sober), release trauma stored by wounded parts, and move towards internal harmony.
Angela offers IFS sessions and is Level 1 trained through the IFS Institute.