SERVICES

Childhood Trauma Therapy

in San Francisco and California

You've done enough self-reflection to understand where a lot of this comes from. You know your childhood wasn't easy. You know your parents had their own limitations. You can draw a clear line between what happened then and how you move through the world now.

And yet understanding it hasn't made it stop. The anxiety is still there. The people-pleasing is still there. The hypervigilance in relationships, the way you shut down under criticism, the pull toward people who can't quite meet you: these patterns keep running, even when you can see them clearly. As a California psychologist specializing in childhood trauma, complex trauma, and family of origin wounds, I provide therapy that goes beneath the understanding to address what the understanding alone can't reach, through online therapy throughout California.

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My Approach to Childhood Trauma and Complex Trauma Therapy

My approach is relational, depth-oriented, and grounded in attachment theory. Childhood trauma isn't only about what happened. It's about what the experiences you had as a child taught you about yourself, about other people, and about whether the world is a safe place to be fully yourself in. Those lessons don't live in conscious thought. They live in the nervous system, in automatic responses, in the patterns that repeat across every relationship you've ever tried to have.

I draw from relational psychodynamic therapy, attachment theory, and evidence-based approaches to work at the level where that material actually lives, not just the surface behavior but the underlying beliefs and nervous system patterns driving it.

I provide online individual therapy for childhood trauma and family of origin work throughout California. All sessions happen via secure video (Zoom) from wherever you're most comfortable.

My focus is on creating lasting change through:

Understanding the Roots of Your Current Pattern

We connect what's happening in your life now to where it formed: what you learned early about love, safety, your own worth, and what you had to become to survive your particular family system.

Working With the Nervous System, Not Just the Mind

Insight is necessary but not sufficient. The patterns formed in childhood are stored in the body and the nervous system, and changing them requires more than understanding them. We work experientially, building new patterns through the therapeutic relationship itself.

Changing What Gets Carried Forward

The goal isn't to excavate the past for its own sake. It's to interrupt what the past is still doing in your present: the relationships it's shaping, the choices it's narrowing, the version of yourself it's keeping you from fully inhabiting.

What is childhood trauma?

Childhood trauma encompasses a wide range of experiences, from overt abuse and neglect to the more subtle but equally formative wounds that don't always get named as trauma because nothing dramatic happened.

You may have grown up in a home that looked fine from the outside. Your parents may have provided materially, may have been well-intentioned, may have done the best they could. And the emotional environment may still have been one that left real marks: love that was conditional on performance, emotional needs that were dismissed or went unacknowledged, a parent whose own unresolved pain filled the room and left little space for yours, a family system organized around managing someone else's volatility or fragility.

This is sometimes called "small t" trauma, not because it was small in its impact but because it didn't look like a single catastrophic event. It was cumulative. It was relational. And it shaped you in ways that can be harder to see and harder to name precisely because it was the water you swam in rather than something that happened to you. When this kind of repeated, relational wounding happens in childhood, it is often called complex trauma or C-PTSD (complex PTSD), a term that captures how it affects not just specific memories but identity, self-worth, emotional regulation, and the ability to feel safe in relationships.

Childhood trauma also includes more overt experiences: physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, significant neglect, the loss of a parent, growing up with a parent who struggled with addiction or serious mental illness, witnessing domestic violence. These experiences don't need to be minimized or reframed as less serious than they were. They left real wounds that deserve real attention.

What all of these experiences share is that they happened during the period when you were forming your most fundamental conclusions about yourself and the world, and those conclusions have had decades to organize your life around them.

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Childhood Trauma and Complex Trauma in Women

Complex trauma affects people of all genders, but it has a distinctly gendered dimension that shapes how it develops, how it presents, and how long it goes unrecognized.

Girls are socialized from early on to prioritize relationships, manage others' emotions, and suppress their own needs and reactions in the service of keeping the peace. When that socialization happens inside a family system that is also genuinely unsafe or emotionally harmful, the two become indistinguishable: the cultural message that a girl should be accommodating and undemanding reinforces exactly the survival strategies the difficult family environment is already demanding of her. By the time she reaches adulthood, those strategies feel like personality rather than adaptation.

Why Complex Trauma in Women Is So Often Missed

Women with complex trauma or C-PTSD are frequently misdiagnosed with depression, generalized anxiety, or borderline personality disorder, because the presentations overlap and because the relational and developmental roots of the symptoms are not always explored. A woman who is chronically anxious, people-pleasing, and hypervigilant in relationships may spend years treating the symptoms without the underlying cause ever being named.

High-functioning presentation makes this harder still. Many women with significant complex trauma are extremely capable on the outside: accomplished, responsible, attuned to others, skilled at managing. The internal experience, the exhaustion, the chronic self-doubt, the near-inability to identify or advocate for their own needs, is invisible from the outside and often invisible to themselves until something forces it to the surface.

The Fawn Response and How It Gets Socialized into Girls

The fawn response, the trauma response characterized by automatic people-pleasing, appeasement, and self-erasure in the face of perceived threat, is disproportionately socialized into girls from early childhood. Girls are consistently rewarded for being agreeable, accommodating, and emotionally attuned to others, and consistently penalized for taking up space, expressing anger, or having needs that inconvenience the people around them. When that socialization happens inside a family system that is also emotionally unsafe, the two layers compound each other: the child learns to fawn not just because the culture rewards it but because her particular family required it for emotional survival. By adulthood, the fawn response operates as a near-automatic reflex, and the woman carrying it often has no access to the anger, the needs, or the preferences that were buried beneath it years ago.

The Specific Weight on Daughters

Daughters carry particular expectations around family loyalty and emotional labor that make it harder to name, grieve, or set limits on harmful parent relationships. The cultural pressure to maintain connection with a mother or father regardless of the cost, to be forgiving, to not make things difficult, falls more heavily on daughters than on sons. The guilt of reducing contact with a parent, or simply of having needs that conflict with a parent's, can be immobilizing in ways that are directly connected to this gendered socialization.

This is also why the mother-daughter wound has its own particular gravity. A daughter's first template for what it means to be a woman, to have needs, to take up space, to be worthy of care, comes from her mother. When that template is formed in an environment of conditional love, emotional unavailability, or criticism, its impact on a woman's relationship to herself is deep and specific in ways that take serious attention to address.

How This Work Connects to Women's Mental Health More Broadly

The fawn response, the trauma response characterized by automatic people-pleasing, appeasement, and self-erasure in the face of perceived threat, is disproportionately socialized into girls from early childhood. (Shout out to Dr. Ingrid Clayton - if you have not read her book Fawning, I highly recommend it.) Girls are consistently rewarded for being agreeable, accommodating, and emotionally attuned to others, and consistently penalized for taking up space, expressing anger, or having needs that inconvenience the people around them. When that socialization happens inside a family system that is also emotionally unsafe, the two layers compound each other: the child learns to fawn not just because the culture rewards it but because her particular family required it for emotional survival. By adulthood, the fawn response operates as a near-automatic reflex, and the woman carrying it often has no access to the anger, the needs, or the preferences that were buried beneath it years ago.

What I Work With.

The following are some of the specific presentations and experiences I work with in this area. Each one is its own territory, with its own patterns, its own grief, and its own path through.

Growing up with a mother whose emotional world was organized primarily around herself, whose need for admiration, control, or validation consistently took precedence over yours. The impact tends to be deep and specific: a fraught relationship with your own needs, a reflexive tendency to make yourself smaller, a distorted sense of what you're entitled to feel or ask for, and a grief that is complicated by the fact that what you're mourning is a mother who is still alive. Narcissistic mother therapy →
The particular wounds of growing up with a father whose need for admiration or control shaped the emotional climate of the family. The impact on daughters often shows up in patterns around self-worth, relationships with men, and a hunger for approval from people who are constitutionally unable to provide it. Narcissistic father therapy →
The grief and psychological impact of not having the mother you needed, regardless of whether your mother was a narcissist, emotionally immature, simply limited, or absent. The mother wound isn't always about a terrible mother. It's about the gap between what you needed and what was available, and how that gap shaped your relationship with your own worth, your body, your needs, and your capacity for self-compassion. Mother wound therapy →
The specific psychological impact of a father who was absent, emotionally unavailable, critical, volatile, or simply not there in the ways that mattered. Father wounds often show up in patterns around self-worth, authority, and the template for intimacy with partners, and they deserve the same serious attention as mother wounds do. Father wound therapy →
The experience of growing up in a family where emotions were consistently ignored, dismissed, or treated as inconvenient. Childhood emotional neglect is particularly hard to identify because it is defined by what didn't happen rather than what did. There was no dramatic event, no obvious wound, just a persistent absence of emotional attunement that left you disconnected from your own inner life in ways that take real work to reverse.
Growing up in a family system with blurred or absent boundaries, where you may have been treated as a confidant, a caretaker, or an emotional support for a parent rather than as a child with your own needs. Parentification, being asked to take on an adult emotional role before you had the developmental resources to carry it, leaves a particular kind of exhaustion and a particular difficulty knowing where you end and others begin.
The trauma response that shows up as automatic people-pleasing, appeasing, and self-erasure in the face of potential conflict or disapproval. If you learned early that your safety depended on keeping others comfortable, fawning becomes a survival strategy. In adulthood it looks like chronic over-accommodation and a near-inability to prioritize your own needs. This work connects closely with therapy for people-pleasing.

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How Childhood Trauma Shows Up in Your Relationships

One of the most consistent things about childhood trauma is that it doesn't stay in childhood. It travels with you, and it tends to become most visible in close relationships, where the stakes are high enough to activate the old nervous system patterns in full.

If you learned early that love was conditional, you likely carry a hypervigilance into relationships, scanning for signs of withdrawal or disapproval, managing your behavior to prevent it. If you learned that your needs were too much, you likely bring a chronic under-asking into your closest relationships, giving far more than you receive and building resentment you don't know what to do with. If you learned that vulnerability led to punishment or abandonment, you likely keep a wall up even with the people you most want to be close to.

These patterns show up in romantic relationships, in friendships, in the relationship you have with your own body and needs. They are not fixed. They are learned responses, formed in a particular environment, and they can be unlearned in a different one.

This work connects naturally with relationship anxiety therapy, anxious attachment therapy, and couples therapy for those whose childhood patterns are showing up most clearly in their partnership.

How I Work With Childhood Trauma

Childhood trauma doesn't respond to insight alone. Understanding where it came from is necessary, but changing what it's doing in your present life requires working at the level where it actually lives: the nervous system, the relational patterns, the automatic responses that operate faster than thought.

Making the Implicit Explicit

Much of the work of childhood trauma therapy is bringing into awareness what has been operating outside of it. The beliefs formed in childhood are rarely conscious conclusions. They are more like the operating system running underneath everything else, filtering what you notice, what you expect, what you allow yourself to want. Making them explicit, naming them, tracing them to their origins, is what makes them workable.

Using the Therapeutic Relationship as a Vehicle for Change

The most important thing that happens in childhood trauma therapy is not what gets talked about but what gets experienced. A therapeutic relationship that is consistently attuned, honest, and boundaried offers something that explanation alone cannot: a direct experience that the old conclusions about relationships aren't the whole story. That experiential correction, repeated over time, is what actually changes the patterns.

Working with Grief

Much of childhood trauma therapy involves grief: the grief of the childhood you didn't have, the parent you needed and didn't get, and the years spent organizing your life around adaptations that cost you something real. This grief doesn't need to be rushed or reframed. It needs to be held, acknowledged, and given enough space to actually move through you rather than remaining frozen underneath everything else.

Building a New Relationship with Your Own Needs

One of the most consistent themes across every presentation in this category is a broken relationship with your own needs. Children who are raised in environments that don't attune to their emotional lives learn, at a very deep level, that their needs are inconvenient, dangerous, or simply not relevant. Therapy rebuilds that relationship, slowly and with real attention, so that having needs and expressing them stops feeling like a threat to every relationship you value.

Who Benefits from Childhood Trauma Therapy

Adults Who Recognize the Pattern But Can't Seem to Break It

If you find yourself:

Understanding exactly where a pattern comes from and still doing it anyway
Feeling like you've been working on this for years without the kind of change you're looking for
Recognizing your parent's voice in your inner critic but unable to quiet it
Knowing intellectually that you're safe and lovable while your nervous system insists otherwise

Therapy that works at the level of the nervous system and the relational pattern, not just the cognitive understanding, tends to produce a different kind of change.

Adults Navigating Estrangement or Considering It

If you experience:

Thinking seriously about reducing or ending contact with a parent and not knowing how to make that decision
Grief and relief running alongside each other in ways that feel contradictory but aren't
Navigating an estrangement that others in your life don't understand or support
Wanting to make the decision that's right for you rather than the one that manages everyone else's feelings

Therapy is a place to work through the complexity of estrangement without being told what you should do, and to process the grief on both sides of whatever decision you make.

Adults in Painful or Complicated Relationships with Their Parents

If you notice:

A relationship with one or both parents that consistently leaves you feeling diminished, unseen, or destabilized
A pattern of contact and rupture that you can't seem to resolve or exit
Guilt, obligation, and resentment running together in ways that are hard to sort out
Dread around family events, holidays, or contact that others seem to navigate without issue

Therapy provides a space to understand the dynamic clearly, work through the grief of what the relationship isn't, and make conscious choices about what kind of relationship, if any, you want to have.

Adults Whose Childhood Patterns Are Affecting Their Current Relationships

If you struggle with:

Bringing patterns from your family of origin directly into your closest adult relationships
Choosing partners who replicate something familiar in ways you can see but can't seem to change
Difficulty trusting, asking for what you need, or staying present when relationships get close
A sense that your past is more present in your relationships than you want it to be

Therapy addresses the source rather than just the symptom, which is where lasting change in relational patterns tends to come from.

Common Questions About Childhood Trauma Therapy

No. Some of the most significant childhood wounds come from environments that weren't abusive by any conventional definition. Emotional neglect, conditional love, a parent who was emotionally unavailable or consumed by their own pain, a family system that required you to be someone other than who you actually were: these experiences leave real marks even when nothing dramatic happened. If your childhood is still shaping your present life in ways you'd like to change, that's enough.
This is very common, especially with emotional neglect and early relational trauma. Therapy doesn't require complete or detailed memories to be effective. We work with what's present now: the patterns, the responses, the beliefs, the relationship to your own needs. Those carry the information we need, even when explicit memories are limited.
No. Childhood trauma therapy doesn't prescribe any particular relationship structure with your parents. Some people do that work and become clearer about the relationship they want to have. Some reduce contact. Some maintain the relationship but change how they show up in it. Some feel genuine compassion for their parents for the first time. The therapy is about your clarity and your choice, not a predetermined outcome.

The two things are both true simultaneously: your parents may have genuinely done the best they could, and the impact on you may still have been real and significant. Understanding that your parents acted from their own wounds doesn't erase the wounds their behavior created in you. Holding both of those things at once, without minimizing either, is actually part of what this work involves.
The difference is in what changes as a result. A lot of people have spent years talking about their childhoods without the patterns shifting much. That's often because the work stayed at the level of narrative and understanding rather than engaging the nervous system and relational patterns where the material actually lives. Therapy that produces lasting change in childhood trauma tends to work at that deeper level, using the relationship itself as part of the mechanism of change.
Childhood trauma, particularly relational trauma formed over years, tends to require meaningful time to address. Some people notice significant shifts within several months. Deeper work, particularly around attachment patterns and long-standing self-beliefs, tends to unfold over a year or more. The pace is not linear, and the changes tend to compound: each shift in the underlying pattern makes the next one more accessible.