Trauma lives in the body.
Healing can too.
Single-Incident and Complex Trauma
This practice works with the full spectrum of trauma presentations.
Single-incident trauma may follow a car accident, assault, medical emergency, sudden loss, or any experience that overwhelmed your capacity to cope in the moment. Symptoms often include intrusive memories, nightmares, hyperarousal, and avoidance of reminders.
Complex trauma develops over time, through childhood adversity, relational abuse, neglect, parentification, or environments where safety was unpredictable. Its effects tend to be wider and more diffuse: chronic shame, difficulty with identity and boundaries, troubled relationships, and a nervous system that never quite learned to settle.
Both are real. Both respond to somatic, body-centered work. And both are welcome here.
A Note for Those Referred by a Physician or Psychiatrist
If you've been referred here because medication alone hasn't been enough, or because you're looking for a non-pharmacological path, somatic trauma therapy may offer what you've been looking for. The nervous system is trainable. Regulation is a skill that can be developed, and trauma responses that have felt permanent can shift.
How This Work Is Different
Many people arrive having already spent time in talk therapy, sometimes years, without feeling fundamentally different. That is often a sign that the work needs to include the body.
Trauma is encoded in subcortical structures of the brain that language does not easily reach. Approaches that work only through narrative and insight can provide understanding without relief. Somatic trauma therapy engages the nervous system directly, creating conditions for the body to complete what it could not finish at the time of the original experience.
This practice integrates Embodied Regulation Therapy (ERT), a structured, neurobiologically grounded framework built on four pillars of nervous system function: interoceptive awareness, autonomic regulation, cerebellar integration, and prefrontal engagement. ERT provides a clear clinical map for trauma work that is both evidence-informed and deeply attuned to the individual.
You don't have to keep managing this alone.
Reach out to schedule a free consultation. We'll talk about where you are, what you're looking for, and whether this work feels like a good fit.
Understanding Trauma
Trauma is defined not by what happened, but by what happened inside you in response. Whether you experienced a single overwhelming event or years of chronic stress, neglect, or relational harm, the nervous system responds the same way: it adapts to survive.
Those adaptations were once protective. Over time, they can become the source of suffering, showing up as hypervigilance, emotional flooding, numbness, dissociation, difficulty trusting others, or a persistent sense that something is wrong even when life looks fine on the outside.
Trauma therapy at West LA Somatic works with these patterns at their source: the nervous system itself.
What to Expect
Trauma work here is paced, collaborative, and built on safety first. You will not be asked to engage with difficult memories before your nervous system has the resources to handle them. Sessions build capacity gradually, developing the internal stability that makes deeper processing possible and sustainable.
Depending on your needs, sessions may include:
Nervous system mapping and psychoeducation
Somatic resourcing and grounding
Titrated processing of traumatic memory through body-based awareness
Integration work to support lasting change between sessions
Sessions are available in person in West Los Angeles and via telehealth worldwide.
