Integrative Mental Health & Trauma Recovery
Trauma does not simply live in memory. It can become part of the way a person experiences the body, relationships, emotions, identity, desire, and the world itself.
Some people know exactly what happened to them. Others know only that something is wrong. They may understand their patterns intellectually and still find themselves repeating them. They may feel disconnected from their own desires, overwhelmed by emotions that seem disproportionate to the moment, unable to tolerate intimacy, chronically vigilant, numb, exhausted, or caught between wanting connection and desperately wanting to escape it.
This is where integrative work becomes important. The goal is not simply to talk about what happened. It is to understand what the experience has continued to produce in the present, and to work with the person as a whole: nervous system, body, emotions, cognition, behavior, relationships, and sense of self.
The Approach
More than one language for healing
I work from an integrative perspective that brings together Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, trauma-informed approaches, Brainspotting, NLP, mindfulness, somatic work, and counseling. These approaches are not interchangeable, and I do not believe that one method explains every person. Different problems require different ways of seeing.
My doctorate is in Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine, but my clinical work has never been limited to needles. Traditional Chinese Medicine gives me a way of looking at the relationship between physical symptoms, emotional states, patterns of tension, sleep, digestion, energy, pain, and the broader condition of the person. Contemporary trauma work gives me additional ways of understanding how experience can become embodied and repeated.
The point is not to force a person into a particular theory. The point is to understand what is actually happening and find the most useful way to work with it.
Understanding the pattern is important. Learning how to live differently is where the work begins.
Insight can be powerful, but insight by itself does not necessarily change a pattern. A person can know why they react the way they do and still react the same way. They can understand attachment, trauma, dissociation, addiction, or nervous-system regulation and still find themselves pulled into the same emotional state.
Real change requires experience. It requires noticing what happens in the body, recognizing the moment a familiar state begins to take over, creating enough space to choose something different, and practicing that difference until it becomes increasingly available.
Areas of Focus
Complex and developmental trauma
Dissociation and fragmented states
Emotional dysregulation
Trauma-related anxiety and hypervigilance
Addiction and relapse patterns
Relational and childhood trauma
Mind-body integration
The Body Matters
You cannot always think your way out of a state your body has learned.
Trauma can become extraordinarily physical. The jaw tightens. The stomach changes. Sleep becomes disrupted. The heart races. The body becomes restless or collapses into exhaustion. A person may feel numb, disconnected, frozen, agitated, or suddenly overwhelmed without consciously deciding to feel any of those things.
Acupuncture and other body-based approaches provide another point of entry. Rather than asking the person to explain everything before anything can change, we can work directly with physical sensation, autonomic arousal, tension, breath, attention, and the experience of being in the body.
This does not mean abandoning thought or conversation. It means recognizing that human experience is not contained in thought alone.
Brainspotting & NLP
Sometimes the pattern is deeper than the story you can tell.
Brainspotting offers a way of working with experiences that may not be easily organized into words. It uses visual attention, focused awareness, and the person’s own internal experience to explore material that may remain highly charged or difficult to access through ordinary conversation.
NLP adds another dimension by examining the internal representations through which people organize experience: the images they carry, the language they use internally, the states they enter, and the patterns through which those states become associated with particular situations.
Used thoughtfully, these approaches can become practical tools for changing the relationship a person has with a familiar internal pattern rather than simply talking about the pattern indefinitely.
From clinical settings to real life
My clinical experience has included work with people in very different circumstances, from luxury treatment environments in Malibu to detox and recovery settings and community-based care throughout Southern California. That range has shaped the way I work.
People do not arrive as diagnoses. They arrive with histories, defenses, relationships, habits, fears, hopes, bodies, beliefs, and very particular ways of surviving what they have lived through. Good clinical work begins by meeting the actual person rather than forcing the person to become an example of a theory.
Sometimes the work is about trauma. Sometimes it is about pain, sleep, anxiety, addiction, or a body that has been carrying too much for too long. Often these things overlap. The work is to understand the whole picture without losing sight of the person sitting in front of me.
What Sessions Are Like
Compassion, honesty, and practical work.
Sessions are collaborative. We look at what is happening without pretending that difficult patterns disappear simply because we understand them. There is room for compassion, but there is also room for honesty. Sometimes the most useful question is not “Why am I like this?” but “What is happening right now, and what do I want to do next?”
The work may include acupuncture, body-based regulation, Brainspotting, NLP, mindfulness, counseling, or a combination of approaches depending on what is appropriate. The aim is not to accumulate techniques. It is to find what is useful and apply it well.
Over time, the goal is greater freedom: more ability to recognize your internal states, more choice in how you respond, a stronger relationship with your own needs and desires, and less automatic repetition of patterns that no longer serve you.
Clinical Background
Eastern medicine. Contemporary trauma work. One person at a time.
I hold a Doctorate in Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine and am a licensed acupuncturist. My training and clinical work include Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, trauma-informed care, Brainspotting, NLP, mindfulness, somatic approaches, and addiction recovery.
My approach continues to evolve as our understanding of the brain, nervous system, trauma, behavior, and mind-body medicine evolves. I value both the depth of traditional medicine and the growing body of contemporary clinical knowledge.
Begin from where you are.
You do not have to arrive with everything figured out. You can begin with what is happening now, and together we can begin to understand it.
In-person sessions in San Pedro, California
Online sessions available where permitted