Therapist Westwood | Somatic & Trauma Therapy

I offer somatic therapy and body-centered healing support in Westwood, CA for adults who are thoughtful, intellectually engaged, and often living with a gap between what they understand and what they can actually feel in their bodies. You may be navigating grief, chronic illness, trauma, anxiety, academic pressure, professional intensity, or a life transition that has made your body feel tight, distant, or hard to trust. My role is to offer a grounded space where insight, sensation, emotion, and lived experience can begin to integrate.

I have worked with clients across the Westside for years, including people connected to UCLA, Westwood Village, nearby medical centers, apartments, professional offices, and neighborhoods between Brentwood, Beverly Hills, and Century City. Westwood has an intellectually driven rhythm shaped by education, medicine, research, ambition, and constant movement. Many people here are deeply capable and self-aware, but still feel braced or disconnected beneath the surface.

In Westwood, many clients come to this work because thinking through things has helped them survive, but has not helped them fully inhabit themselves. You may know how to analyze your patterns and still feel your body react before you can choose. I offer support that begins where explanation ends, helping you build nervous system awareness, pacing, and embodied self-trust.

If you are intellectually engaged, self-aware, and able to explain your patterns, it can be frustrating when your body still reacts before there is time to choose. You may be navigating grief, chronic illness, trauma, anxiety, academic pressure, professional intensity, or a transition that has made your body feel tight, alert, or hard to trust.

You may spend much of your life thinking, studying, caring, researching, explaining, or solving. Those capacities can be meaningful and necessary, but they can also pull you away from sensation, emotion, rest, and the quieter intelligence of the body.

Somatic psychotherapy can help us explore the gap between what you know and what you feel. For people shaped by UCLA, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, research, study, caregiving, and high expectations, this work makes room for the body when life has asked you to live mostly from the head.

If much of your life is shaped by thinking, studying, researching, caregiving, or solving, it may feel unfamiliar to let the body lead. You may be navigating anxiety, grief, trauma, chronic illness, academic pressure, professional intensity, or the frustration of knowing what is happening but still feeling tight, alert, or disconnected.

Movement can help bridge the gap between what you understand and what you can actually feel. You may begin to notice how your body responds before thought arrives, where you brace, and what becomes possible when sensation is given time and attention.

In movement therapy, we may explore breath, weight, posture, emotion, nervous system cues, pacing, and the quieter intelligence beneath analysis. For people shaped by UCLA, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, research, study, care work, and high expectations, this work makes room for the body when life has asked you to live mostly from the head.

Insight can be powerful and still not enough when trauma lives in the body. You may be able to explain your patterns, trace their origins, and understand your responses, while your nervous system still reacts before thought can catch up.

For people shaped by study, research, medicine, caregiving, and high expectations, it can be hard to let the body have a voice. Trauma therapy can help bridge the gap between what you know and what you feel.

We may explore sensation, memory, nervous system responses, emotion, and the pressure to live from the head. Around UCLA, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, academic intensity, and care work, this gives the body room to be included.

Insight may be strong, but your body may still react before thought can catch up. Academic pressure, medical environments, caregiving, trauma, or grief can leave your system alert long after the moment has passed.

The work can help bridge what you know and what you feel. Less reactivity, more clarity, and a stronger sense of internal safety may become possible.

In EMDR therapy, we may explore memories, sensations, beliefs, and nervous system responses that still feel unresolved. Around UCLA, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, study, research, and care work, this makes room for the body to be included.

If your life asks you to think, study, care, research, or solve, it can be painful when depression, trauma, or grief does not respond to understanding. You may know a lot and still feel far from relief.

This process can support experiences of perspective, emotional movement, and connection that are not purely cognitive. The integration matters because the body needs time to make meaning from what opens.

In ketamine therapy, we may explore preparation, sensation, imagery, emotion, memory, and post-session grounding. Around UCLA, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, study, research, and care work, this gives the body a place in healing.

When your life values thinking, research, care, and precision, OCD can be especially convincing. The mind may turn doubt into a problem that must be solved before you can move on.

The shift often begins when you learn to recognize the loop without obeying it. More clarity, less reassurance seeking, and more tolerance for uncertainty can create real relief.

In OCD therapy, we may explore intrusive thoughts, compulsions, health anxiety, checking, avoidance, and the body’s response to doubt. Around UCLA, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, study, research, and care work, this helps make room for life beyond analysis.

Medical spaces, research, and information can be helpful, but they may not fully hold the emotional experience of living in a body that is changing. You may know a lot about what is happening and still feel scared, angry, or disconnected.

Support can help bridge the gap between medical management and lived experience. There may be more room for grief, pacing, uncertainty, and a less adversarial relationship with your body.

Through chronic illness therapy, we may explore symptoms, body signals, medical trauma, fatigue, identity, and nervous system overwhelm. Around UCLA, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, study, and care work, this makes space for the person inside the diagnosis.

Study, analysis, and new information can help you understand religious trauma, but your body may still carry fear, shame, or the reflex to obey. Knowing something was harmful does not always make it stop living inside.

Support can help bridge what you understand and what still feels unsafe. The work can support agency, boundaries, and a slower return to your own voice.

Through religious trauma therapy, we may explore shame, certainty, authority, grief, sexuality, identity, and body responses. Around UCLA, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, research, care work, and high expectations, this makes room for knowledge and embodiment to meet.