Therapist Venice | Trauma & Somatic Therapy
I offer somatic therapy and body-centered healing support in Venice, CA for adults who are creative, sensitive, expressive, and longing to feel more connected to their bodies and inner lives. You may be navigating grief, chronic illness, trauma, creative blocks, emotional intensity, or the feeling that you are living beside yourself rather than fully inside your experience. My role in this community is to offer a relational space where movement, sensation, emotion, and creativity can all become part of the healing process.
I have supported clients across Santa Monica and the Westside for years, including people drawn to Venice’s artistic history, coastal energy, studios, canals, Abbot Kinney, and the neighborhoods close to the beach. Venice holds a unique mix of freedom, intensity, beauty, and contradiction. It is a place where people often seek expression and aliveness, while privately carrying grief, survival patterns, illness, or nervous system exhaustion.
In Venice, the challenge is that outward creativity does not always mean inner spaciousness. You may look expressive or independent while still feeling tight, blocked, or overwhelmed inside. I offer support that does not ask you to perform wellness. Instead, we practice listening to what your body has been holding and making enough space for something honest to move.
Here’s What’s Included
Step 1: Slowing Down and Building Awareness
We begin by creating space to notice what is happening in your body, thoughts, and emotional life. Together we explore patterns of tension, sensation, and response, helping you understand how your nervous system has learned to organize itself over time.
Step 2: Developing a Relationship with Your Inner Experience
Rather than trying to fix or override what you feel, we build curiosity and capacity with what arises in the moment. This may include somatic awareness, relational dialogue, EMDR when appropriate, or gentle movement and creative exploration.
Step 3: Supporting Integration Over Time
As awareness grows, many people begin to notice meaningful shifts, more room to breathe, more flexibility in how they respond to stress, and a deeper sense of trust in their own bodies.
Explore my therapy services and specializations
If you are creative, sensitive, expressive, or deeply feeling, you may still find yourself blocked, overwhelmed, or disconnected from your body. Grief, chronic illness, trauma, relational change, or a season of emotional intensity may be asking for more space than you have known how to give it.
You may feel most alive when you are making, moving, connecting, or immersed in beauty, and still feel numb, braced, or flooded when things get quiet. Creativity can carry what words cannot, but it can also reveal where pressure, perfection, and survival patterns have been living.
In somatic psychotherapy, we may explore movement, emotion, sensation, creative process, memory, and the ways your body protects what feels tender or unfinished. Around Abbot Kinney, the canals, studios, beach paths, and constant reinvention, this work makes space for expression that does not have to become performance.
If you are creative, expressive, sensitive, or drawn to movement, you may still feel blocked when it comes to letting your body be seen, felt, or followed. Trauma, grief, chronic illness, relational change, or creative pressure may have made expression feel less free than it looks from the outside.
You may feel alive when you are near music, art, water, or motion, and still notice parts of yourself that freeze, collapse, tighten, or disappear when emotion comes close. This work can help movement become a place of listening rather than proving, a way to make room for what has not yet had space.
Through movement therapy, we may explore gesture, sensation, improvisation, rhythm, emotion, and the places where your body protects what is tender. Around Abbot Kinney, studios, beach paths, the canals, and constant reinvention, this work supports expression that does not have to become performance.
Creative, expressive people often carry trauma in ways that are not immediately visible. Something in you may want to move, connect, make, or feel, while another part tightens, disappears, freezes, or becomes overwhelmed when emotion comes close.
Expression can be healing, but it can also become another place where you feel pressure to transform pain into something meaningful before it has been fully met. Trauma therapy gives the body room to be honest without needing to perform resilience.
We may explore sensation, movement, memory, emotion, creative blocks, and the ways your system protects what still feels tender. Around Abbot Kinney, studios, beach paths, the canals, and constant reinvention, this work supports expression that does not have to become performance.
Creative people often carry memories through image, sensation, movement, and atmosphere before they ever become language. A relationship, loss, or earlier trauma may still shape how open or protected you feel.
The goal is not to erase what happened. It is to help your body experience the past as past, so expression can return with less fear and more choice.
Through EMDR therapy, we may explore memories, body cues, emotions, and beliefs that still feel alive. Around Abbot Kinney, studios, beach paths, and constant reinvention, this supports expression that does not have to be organized around survival.
Creative and sensitive people may feel the weight of depression, grief, trauma, or illness not only in thought, but in the body, imagination, and sense of aliveness. What once felt vivid may feel muted or far away.
There can be value in meeting the material that rises with care, pacing, and integration. New perspective may become useful only when it can be brought back into the body and daily life.
Through ketamine therapy, we may explore intention, sensation, emotion, imagery, creative symbols, and what needs grounding afterward. Around Abbot Kinney, studios, beach paths, and reinvention, this supports depth without turning healing into performance.
Intrusive thoughts can feel especially distressing when you are sensitive, creative, or deeply attuned to meaning. The mind may attach fear to identity, relationships, harm, health, spirituality, or whether you are living correctly.
OCD therapy can help separate your values from the anxiety that keeps demanding certainty. Over time, you may experience more room to create, connect, and live without checking every inner movement.
We may explore obsessions, compulsions, avoidance, shame, sensation, and the need to neutralize discomfort. Around Abbot Kinney, studios, beach paths, and reinvention, this work supports expression without letting fear become the director.
Illness can complicate creativity, movement, relationships, and the feeling of being fully alive. You may long for expression while your body asks for rest, limits, or a different pace than you expected.
The work can help you grieve what has changed while still staying connected to what remains possible. Relief may come through honoring the body’s intelligence instead of fighting it.
In chronic illness therapy, we may explore fatigue, pain, grief, creativity, pacing, anger, and body trust. Around Abbot Kinney, studios, beach paths, and constant reinvention, this offers room for aliveness that does not depend on pushing past capacity.
Creativity, embodiment, pleasure, and self-expression can feel complicated after religious trauma. You may want freedom, but your body may still carry shame, fear, or the reflex to monitor yourself.
The work can help you reclaim expression without turning it into another performance of liberation. You may begin to feel more permission to move, want, question, create, and belong to yourself.
In religious trauma therapy, we may explore control, purity, shame, anger, grief, spirituality, sexuality, and body trust. Around Abbot Kinney, studios, beach paths, and reinvention, this supports a freedom that can actually be felt in the body.
I serve clients in Venice and nearby areas
Testimonials
“Danielle is a wonderfully intuitive practitioner who knows how to listen and empathize at a very deep level. She also has a deep, spiritual presence and understanding that can only be attained through real life experiences - In other words she gets it. She really helped me gain clarity on my goals and feel more grounded. I’d recommend her to anyone looking for a blend of intellect and intuition.”
Client
"What I valued most about working with Danielle was her genuine curiosity. She made a real effort to understand me rather than fit me into a framework, which helped me build more self-compassion and trust in myself. I always felt like a partner in the process, never a patient being managed. I'm so grateful I found her."
Client
“The space Danielle creates could only come from someone who has done deep excavation work and returned with the medicine of her soul. She is exquisitely embodied, attuned, and holds a torch for others to safely inhabit their bodies and express themselves – no matter where they are on their journey. No matter where I am inside of myself when I enter her classes, I leave feeling more connected to myself and my own expression.”
Student
Hello, I’m Danielle Wiggins, a somatic therapist serving Venice
I am the founder of Space Takes Practice, a somatic psychotherapy and creative embodiment practice that began from a lifelong relationship with movement as a place of honesty, expression, and listening. Before I had clinical language for this work, movement helped me understand what words alone could not reach. Today, I support artists, creatives, and sensitive adults navigating trauma, grief, chronic illness, OCD, religious trauma, and life transitions with care that makes room for the body, emotion, creativity, and aliveness.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get started?
The first step is scheduling a consultation. This gives us a chance to briefly connect, discuss what you're looking for, and see whether the work feels like a good fit.
What happens in a somatic psychotherapy session?
Sessions include conversation as well as attention to the body’s sensations, emotions, and nervous system responses. Together we explore patterns of tension, bracing, emotion, and expression in a way that supports awareness and integration over time.
Do you offer virtual sessions, in-person sessions, or both?
Sessions are offered virtually and in person in Santa Monica. We can discuss what format works best for you during the consultation.
Do you accept insurance?
Space Takes Practice is an out-of-network practice. Payment is due at the time of service, and a superbill can be provided for potential reimbursement through your insurance provider.
Do you offer sliding scale options?
A limited number of sliding scale spots are available. If cost is a concern, you're welcome to ask about availability during your consultation.
What if I need to cancel or reschedule?
Please provide at least 48 hours' notice for cancellations or rescheduling. Sessions cancelled with less notice will be charged the full session fee.
What are extended sessions or therapy intensives?
Extended sessions allow us to work together for a longer period of time (90 minutes to several hours). These can be especially supportive for EMDR work or when exploring experiences that benefit from additional space and depth.
How often do people usually meet for therapy?
Most people begin with weekly sessions. The consistency of meeting regularly creates a kind of practice — a rhythm that supports awareness, integration, and nervous system change over time.
As the work evolves, we can always adjust the pace of sessions.
How is somatic therapy different from traditional talk therapy?
Somatic psychotherapy includes the body as part of the therapeutic process. Rather than working only with thoughts and stories, we also pay attention to sensation, nervous system patterns, and the ways the body holds experience. This can allow insight to become something you actually feel and live, not just something you understand.
How do I know if this work is right for me?
Many people who find their way to this work are thoughtful and self-aware but feel something in their experience hasn’t fully shifted despite years of insight or reflection. If you’re curious about working with the body, nervous system, and emotional life — not just thoughts alone — this approach may resonate with you. A consultation is a good way for us to explore whether it feels like a supportive fit.
Do I need to have a specific problem to start therapy?
Not necessarily. Some people come to therapy during a specific challenge such as grief, trauma, illness, or major life transitions. Others come because they feel stuck, disconnected, or curious about understanding themselves more deeply. Therapy can be a space for exploration, integration, and growth — not only crisis.
What if I’ve already been in therapy before?
Many of the people I work with have already spent years in therapy or personal growth work. They often understand their patterns intellectually but still feel tension, overwhelm, or disconnection in their bodies. Somatic psychotherapy offers a way to include the body and nervous system in the process, allowing insight to gradually become something that is lived and felt.
Good Faith Estimate
You have the right to receive a “Good Faith Estimate” explaining how much your medical and mental health care will cost.
Under the law, health care providers need to give patients who don’t have insurance or who are not using insurance an estimate of the expected charges for medical services, including psychotherapy services.
You have the right to receive a Good Faith Estimate for the total expected cost of any non-emergency healthcare services, including psychotherapy services. You can ask your health care provider, and any other provider you choose, for a Good Faith Estimate before you schedule a service.
If you receive a bill that is at least $400 more than your Good Faith Estimate, you can dispute the bill. Make sure to save a copy or picture of your Good Faith Estimate.
For questions or more information about your right to a Good Faith Estimate, visit www.cms.gov/nosurprises or call (800) 985-3059.
