Trauma is not only a story you remember. It is also something your nervous system keeps doing. The racing heart before a conversation that has not happened yet, the flatness that arrives out of nowhere, the sense of being braced without knowing what for: none of that is reached by insight alone.
The Trauma Resiliency Model is a set of body-based skills for noticing what your nervous system is doing and influencing it deliberately. I teach these skills early, because they are what make the harder work possible.
What the skills actually are
Concrete and unglamorous. Tracking, which is noticing sensation without interpreting it. Resourcing, which is building an internal reference point that reliably settles you. Grounding. Gesturing. Shift and stay, which is learning to move attention between distress and calm rather than being stuck in either.
None of this requires believing anything in particular. It is closer to learning where the brakes are than to a philosophy.
Why I teach this first
The most common reason trauma therapy goes badly is that processing starts before a person has any reliable way to come back down. You leave a session activated, white-knuckle the rest of the week, and quite sensibly conclude that therapy makes things worse.
So before we approach anything difficult with EMDR, I want you to have a few things that work. Not in theory, but tested, in a session, so you know from experience that you can get back to steady. That is what makes it possible to go toward something rather than around it.
These skills matter even more in online sessions, where the hour ends and you are immediately back in your own house rather than having a drive to decompress.
What it is not
It is not a treatment for trauma on its own, and I would not present it as one. It is the stabilising layer underneath the treatment. Used by itself it can make life more manageable, which is worth something, but it does not resolve what is driving the symptoms.
It is also worth being straightforward about the research. The Trauma Resiliency Model has a much smaller evidence base than EMDR or Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. What exists is mostly early work, some of it published by the model’s own developers, and it is collected by the Trauma Resource Institute. I use these skills because they work reliably in the room and because they make better-researched treatments safer to deliver, not because the evidence for them is settled.
Practical details
This is part of the work rather than a separate service, so it is included in ordinary sessions: $260 for 50 minutes, in person in Los Angeles or by video anywhere in California. See the rates page for fees and superbills.
Talk to me first
We can speak at no cost before you commit to anything. Call (310) 926-4001 or send a note through the contact page.