HOListic trauma therapy® redefines HOW trauma therapy is conceptualizedOur Approach to Trauma Therapy in Pasadena, California
Six Pillars. Three Channels. One cohesive approach to trauma resolution.
Our Approach to Trauma Healing
You may have already done a great deal of work. You may have read the books, named the patterns, traced the story back through your family, your relationships, your career. You may understand, with great clarity, what happened to you. And still, something has not moved. The body remains braced. The same patterns keep returning. The same loneliness shows up in the same shape, no matter how much insight you bring to it.
That gap, between knowing and healing, is not a personal failure. It is one of the most important findings in the modern study of trauma. Trauma does not live only in the story. It lives in the nervous system, in the body, in the parts of us that learned to protect what could not yet be felt, and in the deeper layers of identity, meaning, and belonging that most therapies are not built to reach.
Our approach was built for that gap.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, we practice full-spectrum trauma healing. Care designed to meet the whole of you, not the parts of you that fit a diagnosis. Our work integrates Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems and parts work, attachment-informed psychotherapy, ISST-D Advanced Professional Trauma Training, the tri-phasic model of complex trauma treatment, depth and transpersonal psychology, consciousness studies, and culturally attuned care. EMDR and other evidence-based modalities are available where they serve the work. The method is led by Chief Traumatologist Seema Sharma, SEP, LMFT, trained directly under Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Gabor Maté, and Dr. Dan Siegel. Drawing on Dr. Maté's framework, we help restore the three channels of human Knowledge - the cognitive, the somatic, and the intuitive - that trauma collapses into the thinking mind alone. This is therapy spacious enough to hold all of you. Your story. Your body. Your protective parts. Your culture. Your spirit. The authentic self that trauma may have hidden but never destroyed. Holistic Trauma Therapy® serves clients in Pasadena, Newport Beach, and virtually throughout California.
A practice, not a personality
Holistic Trauma Therapy® is led by Chief Traumatologist Seema Sharma, SEP, LMFT, and the clinical method described on this page is the method our entire team practices. Every associate at Holistic Trauma Therapy® is selected for their alignment with this approach and trained under Seema's direct supervision. When you work with anyone in this practice, you are working inside the same clinical philosophy, the same depth standard, the same understanding of trauma, and the same reverence for the person sitting across from us.
This is the practice's method. It does not change depending on which clinician you sit with. It is the through-line.
What we mean by full-spectrum trauma healing
There are many names for the pain a person can carry. Attachment trauma. Workplace trauma. Racial, religious, sexual, betrayal, intergenerational, complex. These names can be useful. They give language to experiences that once felt invisible. But your healing is not a label. You are not a category of pain. You are a whole person whose life has been shaped by many experiences, some obvious, some quieter, some remembered with clarity, and some held silently in the body, the nervous system, the relationships you formed, the identity you built, and the spirit that has been quietly listening underneath it all.
The science of consciousness now confirms what depth traditions have always known. Trauma alters how a human being experiences the basics of being alive. The sense of time. The sense of the body. The sense of thought. The sense of emotion. Researchers such as Ruth Lanius and Paul Frewen call these shifts trauma-related altered states of consciousness, and they are not metaphor. They are measurable. The way you perceive yourself, your body, and the present moment can be quietly reshaped by what you have lived through. The capacity to feel yourself from the inside, what neuroscientists call interoception, is one of the foundations of the self. When trauma overwhelms a nervous system, this inner sense quiets. The body becomes a place to manage rather than a place to live. Restoring it is not optional. It is the work.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, full-spectrum trauma healing means we hold the whole of you. Trauma rarely lives in one tidy place. A workplace betrayal can awaken an old attachment wound. A sexual trauma can fracture your sense of safety, intimacy, and spiritual meaning all at once. A family inheritance can move through generations and show up in this life as perfectionism, self-abandonment, or a body that never quite learns to rest. Religious trauma can live not only in belief, but in the body, in shame, and in the parts of you that learned to survive by hiding.
We are prepared to meet all of these layers in the same room, in the same hour, in the same breath. We do not press your story into one method, one diagnosis, or one framework. We listen for the body's wisdom. We listen for the nervous system's patterns. We listen for the protective parts of you that carried what was once unbearable. We listen for the deeper questions of meaning, identity, and belonging that trauma raises, and that few therapies are built to hold.
Healing, in this sense, is not about becoming someone new. It is the slow return of what trauma quieted. The embodied self-awareness. The intuition. The aliveness. The voice. The body. The right to exist as the whole self you have always, underneath everything, been.
That is what we mean by full-spectrum trauma healing. A therapeutic space spacious enough to hold all of you. Grounded enough in modern consciousness science to know what is actually happening inside a traumatized mind and body. And compassionate enough to walk with you back to the truth of who you have always been.
The Six Pillars of Our Method.
THE HOLISTIC DIFFERENCE
Our method rests on six integrated pillars. They are not a sequence to move through. They are a clinical and contemplative architecture that allows us at Holistic Trauma Therapy® to meet you wherever the work needs to begin.
Pillar 1 - Evidence-based clinical care, held inside fierce compassion.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, we begin with some of the most respected trauma treatment modalities in the field, shaped by many of the greatest minds in trauma care.
Somatic Experiencing supports the trauma the nervous system has been carrying. Internal Family Systems and parts work tend to the protective selves that held what was once unbearable. Attachment-informed psychotherapy brings awareness to the relational patterns shaped by our earliest bonds. EMDR is used when it serves the work. These approaches are taught at the highest levels of the field, and at Holistic Trauma Therapy®, we practice them with clinical rigor.
What makes our work distinct is not only the modalities we use, but the ground from which they are offered.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, every modality is held inside compassion. Not surface-level compassion. Not politeness. Not simply being kind. We practice compassion as a clinical stance: the willingness to understand why a person adapted the way they did, to recognize the humanity of both client and clinician, to name what is actually happening with care and honesty, and to keep sight of the possibility beneath the wound.
This is fierce compassion.
It allows us to meet trauma without colluding with shame, avoidance, or self-abandonment. It allows us to honor protective adaptations while also gently inviting something new. It allows clinical rigor and deep humanity to exist in the same room.
These are not simply techniques. They are the inner stance from which every clinical modality is offered.
Without compassion, modalities can become procedures.
With fierce compassion, they become healing.
Pillar 2 - ISST-D Advanced Professional Trauma Training and the Tri-Phasic model.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, complex trauma is not treated casually. Our clinical foundation is shaped by advanced training in the treatment of trauma and dissociation, including the tri-phasic model recognized across the field as a cornerstone of complex trauma care.
This model gives our work a clinical compass.
Phase one is safety, stabilization, and resourcing. This is where the nervous system learns that healing does not require overwhelm. We build capacity, strengthen internal and external resources, support emotional regulation, and help clients develop enough safety to remain present with themselves. This phase is measured in skills, not in time. Taking it seriously is one of the clearest markers of trauma-informed care.
Phase two is remembrance and mourning. This is the deeper trauma-processing work, where what was once unspeakable can begin to be witnessed, felt, named, and integrated. The goal is not to force someone back into the past, but to help what has been frozen begin to move in a way the nervous system can tolerate.
Phase three is reconnection and integration. This is where life becomes less organized around what happened and more connected to choice, relationship, meaning, embodiment, and possibility.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, we do not treat the tri-phasic model as a rigid sequence. We hold it as a living clinical map. It helps us understand where a client is, what the moment is asking for, and what the nervous system is actually ready to receive.
Pillar 3 - Somatic and nervous-system care.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, we understand that trauma lives in the body. This is not simply a belief. It is central to how modern trauma healing understands the nervous system, survival responses, and the body’s role in holding what has not yet been fully processed.
The body often carries what the mind has not yet been able to know. The survival energy that never completed. The breath that learned to stay shallow. The jaw that learned to brace. The shoulders that learned to carry too much. The belly, pelvis, chest, and throat that learned to protect, contract, or disappear.
Our work with the body is unhurried. We do not force release. We do not override protective responses. We track. We notice. We listen. We help the nervous system discover, often for the first time, that it can settle in the presence of another human being.
That is not small.
It is the ground on which all other healing rests.
Pillar 4 - Depth and transpersonal psychology.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, healing is not limited to symptom reduction. We do not see a person as a diagnosis to be managed, a nervous system to be regulated, or a set of behaviors to be corrected. We see a whole human being carrying a life, a lineage, a body, a soul, and an inner world with its own intelligence.
Depth psychology helps us listen beneath the surface of what hurts. It asks what the symptom may be protecting, what the pattern may be expressing, and what deeper story is trying to come into awareness. Transpersonal psychology allows us to hold meaning, identity, spirituality, awe, mystery, and transformation as part of the healing process, not as distractions from it.
This matters because trauma does not only shape the nervous system. It shapes the self. It shapes what we believe we are allowed to want, feel, remember, grieve, become, and belong to.
Our work honors the full terrain of healing: body, mind, story, spirit, relationship, ancestry, meaning, and soul. At HTT, these are not separate from clinical care. They are part of what makes care truly whole.
Pillar 5 - Consciousness as the spirit of mind, body, and spirit.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, when we say mind, body, and spirit, the third word matters.
Spirit is not decoration. It is not an add-on to clinical care. It is the dimension of consciousness, meaning, belonging, intuition, and inner knowing. It is the part of a person that remembers there is more to them than what happened, more than the symptoms, more than survival, and more than the roles they had to play to stay safe.
Trauma does not only affect the mind and body. It can alter the deepest layers of subjective experience: the sense of time, the sense of self, the sense of embodiment, the sense of reality, and the sense of connection to something larger. It can leave a person living from the cognitive mind alone, disconnected from the body’s wisdom, the intuitive self, and the quiet inner voice that once knew what was true.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, consciousness work is the slow restoration of that inner knowing.
We honor the cognitive, the somatic, and the intuitive as essential channels of healing. We help clients return not only to regulation, but to meaning. Not only to function, but to aliveness. Not only to insight, but to the deeper truth beneath the noise of survival.
Without this pillar, trauma therapy can treat symptoms while leaving the soul untouched.
With it, healing reaches the layer where a person can begin to remember who they were before they had to disappear.
Pillar 6 - Culturally attuned care.
Trauma is shaped by culture, family system, immigration, religion, race, gender, sexuality, and the inheritances we never chose. Our clinicians hold specialty in trauma that lives at these intersections. BIPOC and immigrant-family dynamics. High-control religious and spiritual environments. LGBTQ+ identity and minority stress. The trauma of racism and the long body memory it leaves. The particular wounds carried by high-achieving women and people of color whose pain was never given language. We do not require you to explain your culture before you are understood. We do not require you to translate yourself into a frame that does not fit. We meet you where your wound actually lives.
The Three Channels of Knowing, and What Trauma Does to Them
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, one of the ways we understand trauma is through the three channels of knowing taught in Dr. Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry.
Human beings do not know themselves through thought alone. We know through the mind, the body, and the deeper intuitive self.
The first channel is the cognitive channel: the thinking mind. This is the part of us that analyzes, explains, organizes, narrates, and tries to make meaning.
The second is the somatic channel: the body and heart. This is where emotion, sensation, embodiment, and relational presence live.
The third is the intuitive channel: the deeper gut knowing that often arrives before words. It is the quiet sense of truth that does not always need an argument to know what it knows.
When trauma happens, this balance is disrupted. The cognitive channel often takes over and begins doing the work of all three. It analyzes, manages, predicts, performs, explains, and tries to stay ahead of danger. It does this for a reason. At some point, feeling what was happening in the body, heart, or gut may not have been safe. So the mind learned to lead alone.
This is why many clients arrive having read everything, understood everything, and explained everything, yet still feel stuck. The thinking mind has been working overtime for years. Meanwhile, the body may have gone quiet. The heart may have learned to protect itself. The intuitive channel may have been overridden by vigilance, self-doubt, people-pleasing, or survival.
At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, much of the work is the slow restoration of all three channels.
We honor the thinking mind. We do not shame it or bypass it. We understand that it worked hard to protect you. But we also help it soften its grip, so the body can speak, the heart can feel, and the deeper intuitive self can come back online.
Healing means knowing yourself in a fuller way than thinking about yourself ever could.
How the work is held in the room…
Therapy at Holistic Trauma Therapy® is depth-oriented and unhurried. We do not chase symptom relief at the expense of integration. We do not push your nervous system faster than it can move. We work in service of the part of you that is genuinely ready for change, and we move at the pace that part can sustain.
The room itself is shaped by Dr. Dan Siegel's work in Interpersonal Neurobiology. The nervous system of one person regulates inside the nervous system of another. The brain, the body, and the relationship are not separate domains. They are one integrated field, and the field of safety we create together is itself the most important clinical instrument in the work. This is why presence matters here. This is why the clinician you meet has been chosen, trained, and supervised with such care. Healing is a relational event before it is anything else.
Sessions integrate, depending on what the moment is asking for, body-based tracking and somatic resourcing, parts work, attachment-informed conversation, EMDR where it serves the work, gentle exploration of the cognitive narrative, careful attention to what arises beneath language, and a steady relational ground throughout. You will not be handed a protocol. You will not be one-size-fitted. You will be met.
What healing can begin to feel like
We are careful never to promise outcomes. Healing is a living process, and it belongs to you, not to us. What we can say, drawn from years of holding this work for clients who looked very much like you when they first arrived, is this.
Over time, the patterns that once protected you begin to soften. The body learns it does not have to brace against a life that is no longer happening. The thinking mind, finally, gets to rest. The heart and the gut begin to speak again. Relationships shift, because you are showing up differently inside them. The loneliness that hid underneath your accomplishments begins to lift. You begin to recognize yourself, not as the version of you that learned to survive, but as the self that has been waiting underneath the adaptation.
That is the arc we work toward. Insight. Embodiment. Transformation. Held with reverence.
Who this approach is for
Our approach tends to be a strong fit if you recognize yourself in some of what follows.
You have done therapy before, and parts of it helped, but something deeper has not yet moved. You are high-functioning and successful in ways that are visible to others, and quietly exhausted in ways that are not. You have a body that does not feel safe, even when your life is. You carry trauma that is layered, complex, or culturally specific in ways most clinicians have not been trained to meet.
You are ready for depth. You are tired of staying on the surface.
You do not need to have language for any of this when you reach out.
You only need to be ready to begin.
Pasadena office, Newport Beach office, and virtual care throughout California
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.
Questions people ask about our approach
-
Full-spectrum trauma therapy is the integration of Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems and parts work, attachment-informed psychotherapy, advanced training in complex trauma and dissociation through the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation and its tri-phasic model, depth and transpersonal psychology, consciousness studies, and culturally attuned care into one coherent method. EMDR and other evidence-based modalities are available where they serve the work. At Holistic Trauma Therapy®, this method is led by Chief Traumatologist Seema Sharma, SEP, LMFT and practiced by every clinician on the team.
-
Talk therapy works at the level of the cognitive channel, the thinking mind. For many people, that is exactly what is needed. For trauma, it is rarely enough on its own. Trauma lives in the body and the nervous system in ways that conversation alone cannot reach. Our approach pairs depth-oriented conversation with somatic work, parts work, attachment-informed care, and nervous-system regulation, so that healing happens in the body and the relationships of your life, not only in your understanding.
-
No. Most of our clients are high-functioning, accomplished, and outwardly composed. They are not in crisis. They are in a quieter, more private kind of struggle that has often been carried for years. Our approach is built for the depth this kind of work requires. If you are in immediate crisis, please reach out to 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or your nearest emergency room. When you are safe and stable, the deeper work can begin.
-
Sessions are tailored to what you are bringing. Depending on the moment, a session may include somatic tracking and resourcing, parts work, attachment-informed conversation, transpersonal and meaning-based exploration, EMDR where it serves the work, or some integration of all of these. We do not impose a protocol. We follow what the work is asking for.
-
This is one of the most honest questions a person can ask, and there is no single answer. Some clients come for focused work that resolves a specific event over several months. Others are doing deeper, longer work with complex or developmental trauma that unfolds over a longer arc. We will talk openly about this together, and you will always have the choice about the pace and depth that feel right for you.
-
Often, yes. Many of our clients arrive having done years of previous therapy. They are not looking for a beginning. They are looking for the depth, the integration, and the embodied work that may have been missing. Our approach is built for that client.
-
Yes. Our depth and transpersonal training allows us to hold meaning, spirituality, and the questions trauma raises about being human, without imposing a framework. Some of our clients are deeply religious. Some are deconstructing the religion they grew up in. Some have no spiritual frame at all. All are welcome, and all are met in their own language.
