Why I Call Myself a Chief Traumatologist
I want to be honest about something before you read another word.
For a long time, I did not want a title at all.
Titles always felt like a kind of armor to me, a way of standing slightly apart from the person across the room and saying, in so many words, I am the one who knows. I spent twenty-five years in rooms where titles did exactly that. They sorted people. They decided whose voice carried and whose got swallowed. By the time I left that world and found my way into this one, I had a quiet allergy to anything that smelled like a pedestal. So when people ask me, sometimes warmly and sometimes with a raised eyebrow, why I call myself a Chief Traumatologist, the truthful answer is that I resisted it longer than anyone would guess.
This is the story of why I stopped resisting. And why the word, once I let myself sit with it, turned out to describe something I had been living for most of my life without a name for it.
A title I did not go looking for
The word traumatologist is not something I invented. It lives quietly inside the clinical literature on complex trauma, used by the practitioners who spend their working lives with people whose wounds came not from a single terrible event but from years of fear, neglect, or harm that never fully stopped. Pete Walker, whose work on complex PTSD changed how I understand my own history and the histories of the people I sit with, uses the term plainly Pete Walker's work on complex trauma. It simply means a person who studies and treats trauma.
So the root of it is humble. It is descriptive, not grand. What I did was add one word to the front of it, and that word carries the weight of the whole decision.
Chief.
I understand how that can land. In the corporate world I came from, chief meant the top of a hierarchy, the person whose name went on the door. That is not what I mean by it, and I want to be clear about that, because if you are reading this while deciding whether to trust me with the most tender parts of your story, you deserve to know exactly what I am claiming and what I am not.
I am not claiming to be the most important person in the field. I am not claiming a rank above other clinicians, many of whom I learn from constantly. What I am naming is something quieter and, to me, far more accurate. I am saying that trauma is not one thing I do among many. It is the organizing center of my entire life and work. It is the lens through which I understand human suffering, human achievement, and human healing. There is no part of what I offer that is not, at its root, about this.
What the word actually means to me
Let me tell you what a Chief Traumatologist is, in my own words, stripped of anything that sounds like a brochure.
It is someone who has made the study of trauma their life's central work, not as a specialty they picked up in graduate school, but as something they were drawn toward long before they had the language for it.
It is someone who understands trauma across more than one dimension. The neuroscience of a dysregulated nervous system. The way a wound lives in the body and not only in the mind. The cultural and spiritual shapes that trauma takes in different lives. And the many traditions, Western and otherwise, that human beings have built to heal it.
And it is someone who has not only studied this from the outside. I learned a great deal of what I know the hard way, inside my own life and inside the systems that wound people. I will not put my family's private story on this page, because it is theirs as much as mine. But I will say that I did not come to this work as a neutral observer. I came to it because I needed it to survive, and then I stayed because I saw how few people were offering the whole of what healing can be.
Why one word was not enough
People often assume that someone who builds a practice around trauma must have a tidy origin story, one clean event that explains everything. My path did not work that way, and I suspect yours may not either.
I trained in evidence-based Western approaches, and I value them. EMDR. Somatic Experiencing Somatic Experiencing. Parts work. These are not fringe ideas to me. They are part of the daily texture of how I help people. But I also spent years on five continents seeking out healers who would never appear in a clinical journal, the people their communities trusted with the deepest wounds. I studied consciousness as a clinical subject in a doctoral program at the California Institute of Integral Studies California Institute of Integral Studies, one of the few accredited places that takes that seriously. And I carried all of it back into a therapy room in Pasadena.
When I tried to describe what I do, every existing title left something out.
Therapist was true but too small. It described the room, not the orientation of an entire life. Trauma specialist sounded like a line on an insurance form. The longer I searched for the honest word, the more I realized there wasn't one already sitting on a shelf. So I made one, by adding the word that says this is the center, not a corner. Chief.
The part I want you to understand most
Here is what I have come to believe, and it is the reason this title matters to me far more than any status it might signal.
The work of healing trauma is not something I do to people. It is something I do alongside them, as someone who has walked a parallel road.
I am not standing on the far shore calling out instructions to you while you struggle in the water. I have been in the water. I know what it is to be high-functioning and quietly falling apart at the same time, to be praised for the very patterns that were costing you everything. I know what it is for the body to refuse to believe what the mind has long understood. The title, for me, is not a way of placing myself above that experience. It is a way of saying I have organized my whole life around understanding it, so that when you arrive, you do not have to start by explaining what suffering is. I already speak that language.
That is what chief means in this context. Not higher than you. More committed than I knew how to be to anything else.
What a Chief Traumatologist is not
I think it is just as important to name what this title is not, because I have seen the trauma field fill with language that promises more than anyone can deliver.
A Chief Traumatologist is not a guru. I do not have a secret. I am not selling enlightenment, and I am wary of anyone who is.
A Chief Traumatologist is not a person who has finished healing and now dispenses it from a place of completion. Healing is not a destination I have arrived at and you have not. It is a direction we move in, sometimes for the rest of our lives, and I am moving in it too.
And a Chief Traumatologist does not promise to fix you. I do not believe you are broken. I believe you adapted, brilliantly and at great cost, to conditions that asked too much of you. The work is not repair. It is return. It is finding your way back to the parts of yourself that survival taught you to leave behind.
Why the title is part of my own healing
There is one more thing I want to say, and it is the most personal.
Claiming this title was, in its own strange way, part of my healing.
For most of my life, I made myself smaller. I let other people override my knowing. I deferred, I shrank, I worried about what others would think, sometimes when my own intuition was screaming the opposite. That, too, is a trauma response, the kind that looks like humility from the outside and feels like erasure from the inside. Choosing a word that said this is who I am and this is what my life has been about was not an act of ego. For me it was an act of repair. It was the moment I stopped apologizing for the seriousness of my own calling.
So when you see Chief Traumatologist across this website, I hope you will read it differently now. Not as a claim of superiority. As a woman who spent a long time unable to take up space, finally naming the thing she was put here to do.
That is the whole of it. No pedestal. Just a life that pointed in one direction for long enough that I finally gave it a name.
If any of this resonates, if you are tired of being understood in pieces and want to be met as a whole person, you are welcome to begin a conversation whenever you are ready learn more about how I work.
With warmth and respect, Seema
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Chief Traumatologist?
A traumatologist is a clinician who studies and treats trauma, a term that appears in the complex trauma literature. Chief Traumatologist is the name Seema Sharma uses to describe a practice and a life organized entirely around understanding trauma and the many ways humans heal it, drawing together evidence-based Western treatment, somatic work, depth psychology, and global healing traditions. It describes orientation and commitment, not rank above other clinicians.
Is Chief Traumatologist an official credential or license?
No. It is a descriptive title, not a license or board certification. Seema Sharma is a licensed clinician (LMFT), a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and a PhD candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The title describes the focus of her work rather than functioning as a regulatory credential.
How is this different from a regular trauma therapist?
Many excellent therapists treat trauma as one of several areas they work in. The distinction here is that trauma is the central organizing principle of the entire practice, approached across its neurological, somatic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions at once, rather than through a single modality.
Does using a self-coined title mean the approach is not clinically grounded?
The title is unusual, but the work behind it is rooted in established, evidence-based methods including EMDR and Somatic Experiencing, alongside depth and transpersonal approaches. The name simply reflects a particular synthesis. It does not replace clinical training or licensure.
Who does a Chief Traumatologist work with?
Seema works most often with high-achieving professionals, survivors of complex, sexual, workplace, and religious trauma, and culturally complex clients who are tired of explaining themselves from scratch. The common thread is people who appear to be functioning well while carrying wounds that conventional talk therapy alone has not been able to reach.Why does consciousness studies matter for trauma healing
Healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about returning to the parts of yourself that survival taught you to leave behind. If you are ready to be met as a whole person, you are warmly invited to reach out reach out for a consultation.
