Depth-Oriented Trauma Therapy in CaliforniaHow We Heal
Holistic Trauma Therapy® is a depth-oriented trauma healing practice. We work beneath the symptom, with the whole person, in a deliberate sequence that moves from insight to embodiment to lasting transformation. We do not manage symptoms. We help people return to themselves.
Healing has an architecture
Most trauma work presents you with a menu. A list of methods, offered side by side, as if any one of them might be the thing that finally works. We see it differently. Healing is not a method you choose. It is a process that unfolds in an order your nervous system can actually trust.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy® the work begins with understanding, deepens into the body, and integrates into the way you live. Each modality we practice has a place in that sequence. Each one does something the others cannot. Together they form a path, not a checklist.
What once protected you may now be keeping you stuck. The purpose of the work is not to erase what you survived. It is to create the conditions, the depth, the safety, and the clinical support for something underneath the survival to finally come forward.
Insight, Embodiment, Transformation…
This is the arc that organizes everything we do.
Insight is where the work opens. Before the body can release anything, the mind needs to understand what it has been carrying and why. This is the territory of depth and transpersonal psychotherapy, where we look honestly at the patterns, the history, and the meaning beneath them.
Embodiment is where the work deepens. Trauma is not only a story you tell. It is a pattern held in the body, in the nervous system, in the protective parts of you that learned to keep you safe. This is the territory of parts work and somatic therapy, where healing moves from understanding into felt, physical change.
Transformation is where the work integrates. The shifts settle into how you relate, how you rest, how you lead, and how you live. This is not a finish line. It is the quiet evidence that something at the root has changed.
The modalities we practice
The order below is intentional. It reflects the way we believe deep healing actually moves. Each modality has its own page, where you can explore the approach in full.
Depth and Transpersonal Psychotherapy
This is where the work begins and the foundation everything else rests on. Depth psychotherapy looks beneath behavior and symptom to the deeper currents shaping a life, the early patterns, the inner conflicts, the meaning we have carried without ever naming it. Transpersonal work widens the lens further, holding the questions of identity, spirit, and wholeness that traditional models often leave untouched.
For the high-functioning person who has done years of conversation-based work and still feels something unreached, this is often the layer that was missing.
EXPLORE DEPTH PSYCHOTHERAPY → EXPLORE TRANSPERSONAL THERAPY →
Parts Work and Internal Family Systems
You are not one single, unified self moving through the world. You are made of parts, the part that drives and achieves, the part that fears, the part that protects, the part that learned long ago to stay small or stay quiet. Parts work, including Internal Family Systems, helps you turn toward these parts with curiosity rather than judgment.
The protective patterns that exhaust you were not flaws. They were intelligent responses, doing exactly what they learned to do. This work helps them finally rest, so the self underneath can lead.
Somatic Therapy
The body keeps the record. Long after the mind has made sense of what happened, the nervous system can remain on alert, bracing for a threat that has already passed. Somatic therapy works directly with that held experience, gently and at a pace your system can tolerate, so the body can complete what it was never able to finish.
This is where understanding becomes change you can feel. The body may not yet believe what the mind already knows. Somatic work closes that gap.
Holistic EMDR
EMDR helps the brain reprocess memories that have stayed stuck, the moments that still carry the same charge they did the day they happened. In our practice EMDR is never a standalone protocol. It is woven into the deeper work, used when the foundation of safety and self-understanding is in place, so reprocessing becomes integration rather than simply revisiting.
Held inside a depth-oriented container, EMDR becomes one of the most powerful instruments we have for resolving trauma at the root.
Compassionate Inquiry
Developed by Dr. Gabor Maté, Compassionate Inquiry is a gentle, depth-oriented process for revealing what lies beneath the surface of your experience, the beliefs, the adaptations, and the authentic self that protective patterns have obscured. It pairs naturally with the depth and parts work at the center of our approach.
This is the work of meeting yourself honestly, without shame, and remembering who you were before you had to adapt.
Sex Therapy
For many survivors, particularly high-achieving women carrying experiences they have never spoken aloud, trauma lives in intimacy, in the body, and in the relationship to desire and safety. Our trauma-informed sex therapy holds this terrain with clinical depth and genuine care, never clinical distance.
This work is led with the depth of an AASECT Trained Sex Therapist credential and the same reverence we bring to every part of the healing process.
Psychedelic Integration Support
Some clients arrive having had a profound or disorienting experience in a legal, supported, or clinical setting and need a skilled space to make meaning of it. Psychedelic integration support is exactly that, a depth-oriented container for understanding and integrating what surfaced, so insight can settle into lasting change.
This is integration work only. It is held within the same careful, trauma-informed framework that grounds everything we do.
EXPLORE PSYCHEDELIC INTEGRATION →
Transpersonal Psychology and Consciousness Healing
Trauma can fracture more than the psyche. It can sever the sense of connection to something larger, to meaning, to spirit, to a self that feels whole. This dimension of our work, grounded in consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology, holds the spiritual disconnection that is so often part of trauma and so rarely addressed.
For the right client, this is where healing becomes not just relief, but a genuine return to wholeness.
Why the order matters
THE HOLISTIC DIFFERENCE
A practice can offer every modality in the world and still get the sequence wrong. Reprocessing a memory before the nervous system feels safe can overwhelm. Working with the body before the mind understands what it is feeling can confuse. Depth without embodiment stays in the head. Embodiment without depth never reaches the meaning.
The architecture of how we heal is the clinical sophistication. It is also what allows our trained associate clinicians to deliver this same depth of care, each working within a shared framework rather than an improvised menu.
The authority behind the approach
Holistic Trauma Therapy® is led by Chief Traumatologist Seema Sharma, SEP, LMFT, LPCC, whose training spans the full depth of trauma healing, from Somatic Experiencing under Dr. Peter Levine and Compassionate Inquiry under Dr. Gabor Maté, to EMDR, sex therapy, and advanced training in dissociation and depth psychology.
Our associate clinicians are trained under and supervised within this same approach, so the depth of the work holds whoever you are matched with. You are never choosing between Seema and a lesser version of the practice. You are choosing one philosophy of healing, delivered by a skilled team.
Where we work
We see clients in person at our Pasadena office at 65 N. Madison Avenue, Suite 707, in Pasadena, California, and at our Newport Beach office at 1000 Quail Street, Suite 220, in Newport Beach, California. We also offer virtual sessions throughout the state of California, serving clients in Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley, Orange County, San Diego, the Bay Area, and the coastal and rural communities where specialized trauma care is harder to find. We help you decide which format best supports the work you are coming to do.
We are currently accepting new clients.
Frequently asked questions
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We practice depth-oriented trauma therapy. The work is grounded in depth and transpersonal psychology and parts work, with somatic therapy and EMDR used as instruments within that deeper framework. We treat the whole person, not the symptom alone.
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We begin with understanding. Through the early phase of the work your clinician learns how your history, your nervous system, and your protective patterns shaped you, and the approach unfolds from there in a sequence your system can trust. The path is individual, never a fixed protocol.
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Conversation-based approaches can help a great deal, and for some people they reach exactly what is needed. But talk alone may not reach the survival patterns held in the body and the nervous system. Our work is designed to reach those deeper layers, where the body may not yet believe what the mind already knows.
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Yes. Our associate clinicians are trained under and supervised within the same depth-oriented framework. The philosophy of how we heal holds across the whole team.
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Yes. We provide depth-oriented trauma therapy virtually to clients throughout California, alongside in-person sessions in Pasadena and Newport Beach.
