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I’m a dual-licensed therapist in Los Angeles who specializes in anxiety therapy, trauma, somatic work, IFS, and attachment repair. I’ve been featured in TIME Magazine, HuffPost, Verywell Mind, and other major outlets for sharing honest, human insights about what real healing actually looks like.
Polyvagal theory sounds super academic — like something you’d hear in a neuroscience lecture — but it’s basically your body’s way of deciding how safe you are in the world. It’s your nervous system scanning the room faster than your brain can even think. And the star of the show? The vagus nerve. It quite literally runs from your brainstem all the way down into your chest and gut, (acting like the body’s built-in security system). Luckily, somatic practices can help you learn how to feel more safe in your body.
This is your safe-and-social state. Think: you can actually enjoy dinner, laugh with your friend, feel present in your body. Your heart rate is balanced, your breathing is steady, and your digestion works without protest. It’s not like you’re in some perfect bubble — it just means your nervous system has decided, I’m good, I can connect here.
This is fight-or-flight. Heart racing, chest tight, thoughts going way faster than feels manageable. It’s the body saying, Move now. Do something. It makes sense — this mode once saved our ancestors’ lives. Now it shows up when you’re stuck in traffic on the 405 freeway, about to give a presentation, or waiting on a text that never comes.
This one is the sneakiest. Instead of getting wired, you just kind of… shut down. You scroll for hours, or you stay in bed awake but can’t start the day. It’s heavy, flat, disconnected. And it’s not laziness — it’s your body going, I can’t fight this and I can’t escape it, so I’ll shut the system down to conserve energy. It’s protective, even if it feels miserable.
The point isn’t that one state is “good” and the others are “bad” They’re all survival strategies. Your body is literally running evolutionary software that kept humans alive. The real magic is noticing the shifts — catching when you flip into fight-or-flight or freeze — and then learning how to bring yourself back to that steadier ventral state.
And honestly? That’s where polyvagal work changes everything. Because once you realize your body isn’t betraying you, it’s protecting you, you can stop shaming yourself and start working with it.
Instead of staying in your head and focusing on just your thoughts the whole session, a somatic therapist slows things down so you can notice what’s happening underneath the story, in your body. It’s not about rehashing every detail – there’s no point in putting you through that torture. It’s about creating space for your nervous system to respond differently while you’re safe with another human.
Therapeutically, it’s less about the therapist giving you advice and more about them guiding your attention. They might notice the way your breath shifts mid-sentence and ask you to pause there. They might invite you to sense what happens if you take a little more space in your chair, or if you soften your jaw while you’re remembering something painful.
The therapist isn’t “fixing” you. They’re holding the conditions where your body can try a new response in real time. That’s the piece that rewires things — not just talking about the past, but actually experiencing a different outcome in the moment.
Traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy often circles around insight: why you feel what you feel. Somatic therapy values insight too, but it pairs it with practice. Instead of just naming patterns, you’re practicing new ways of being safe and connected while the old triggers are present. It’s experiential, not just intellectual.
Over time, this builds a nervous system that trusts you can come back from intensity without shutting down. That’s what makes body-based therapy powerful — it’s therapy that doesn’t just help you think differently, it helps you literally be different.Curious what that looks like in practice? Here’s more on my approach to nervous system regulation in Los Angeles.
Here’s the thing about trauma: it’s not just about what happened, it’s about what your body had to do to survive it. Polyvagal theory gives us the map of those survival strategies. Instead of saying “why am I like this,” you can start to see, oh — my system was protecting me.
In therapy, that map matters because it gives us language for what feels wordless. We’re not just revisiting memories. We’re showing your nervous system it can experiment with safety in real time. That’s where trauma healing starts — not in thinking it away, but in re-patterning what safety even feels like.
I share more about this process in my Los Angeles trauma therapy approach.
Complex PTSD is basically the nervous system living in a long-term survival loop. It’s not one big event — it’s years of your system deciding connection isn’t safe. Polyvagal theory helps us see that stuckness for what it is: not weakness, not failure, but adaptation.
In therapy, that looks like carefully rebuilding the capacity to come out of survival mode without collapsing. Not overnight. Not with quick fixes. But through repeated micro-moments of safety that slowly convince the body, hey, it’s different now. That’s what lets people with C-PTSD experience real connection again.
You can learn more about my work with complex PTSD clients in Los Angeles here.
Anxiety isn’t just “worry.” It’s the sympathetic system revving like a car engine stuck in gear. Polyvagal theory makes sense of why you feel wired even when nothing “bad” is happening. Your body has already made a call — it thinks speed equals survival.
In therapy, the shift isn’t about convincing yourself to relax. It’s about widening the space between alarm and action. That’s where you learn, slowly, that you literally don’t have to sprint every time you sense stress. That widening of the tunnel vision is what gives you room to breathe, to pause, to choose differently.
I talk more about what anxiety therapy looks like in my practice.
IFS therapy says we’re made up of parts — protective ones, wounded ones, even the exiles that carry the oldest pain. Polyvagal theory gives us the nervous system backdrop for those parts. Because parts don’t just have stories — they have body states.
When you bring the two together, you’re not just listening to a part say “I’m scared.” You’re noticing how that part lives in your physiology — the racing pulse, the collapse, the freeze. That makes it possible to meet the part with compassion and to help the nervous system shift. It’s a double layer of healing: psychological and physiological.
Here’s more about my IFS therapy work in Los Angeles.
If this feels familiar and you’re ready for support, this is exactly the work I do with clients. My approach to working with the nervous system weaves in polyvagal tools with trauma-informed practices like IFS therapy and complex PTSD therapy. It means you’re not just talking about change — your body is practicing it.
If you’re curious what this kind of body-based healing in Los Angeles looks like, you can explore trauma therapy or reach out here to get started.
My background’s a mix of therapy training, neuroscience, and honestly… anthropology. I’ve always been fascinated by how human beings adapt — why our nervous systems react the way they do, and how those ancient survival settings still play out in modern life.
A lot of my sessions weave together somatic practices and polyvagal theory. Because let’s be real: you can analyze anxiety or trauma forever, but until your body actually feels safe, nothing shifts. My job is helping clients catch those tiny nervous system signals in real time — the breath that goes shallow, the way your voice changes mid-story — and then gently guide toward something steadier.
Most of the people I see here in LA look put-together from the outside — they’re smart, creative, high-functioning — but inside, their nervous system is running survival patterns that feel freakin’ exhausting. The work we do is about teaching the body it has more options. That it doesn’t always have to be hypervigilant or that it doesn’t always need to shut down.
It’s the science of how your nervous system responds to safety and danger. The vagus nerve runs from your brain into your body, and it’s constantly signaling which state you’re in — whether you can connect, whether you need to mobilize, or whether you shut down. What makes this important is that it explains why your body reacts before your thoughts do.
Because it’s still new in the world of research. Some scientists want more evidence before they fully sign off, and they argue the early studies don’t cover everything the theory claims. Others push back because it changed the way we think about the vagus nerve — and big shifts like that always meet resistance. At the same time, a lot of therapists and clients see the value in practice every day. It gives language and structure to things people have felt in their bodies forever, and that makes it powerful even while the research keeps evolving.
No, but they overlap in interesting ways. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation to help the brain reprocess stuck memories, while polyvagal theory explains the body states you move through in the process. So they’re not the same model, but you can see how the nervous system science of polyvagal theory helps make sense of why EMDR can feel regulating for some people.
You don’t “do” it like a step-by-step technique. It’s more a way of paying attention. As a nervous system-focused therapist in LA, in sessions I’m tracking where your system is — are you sped up, collapsed, or actually steady enough to connect? Then we work with what shows up in that LITERAL moment. Sometimes that means slowing down, and other times it’s helping you to come back into your body. Oftentimes, it’s just naming out loud what state you’re in.
I see clients across Los Angeles, from Silver Lake to Santa Monica, for somatic and trauma-focused therapy.
